Blackbaud has unveiled Lantern, which it calls the first domain-specific language model purpose-built for fundraising. Announced on 29 September 2026 at bbcon 2026 in Columbus, Ohio, Lantern™️ was developed in a strategic collaboration with data and AI company Databricks and will sit in the intelligence layer of Platform for Good, the unified operating system Blackbaud launched at the same event. Blackbaud says more than $100 billion is raised, granted or managed through its platforms every year. Chief executive Mike Gianoni said general-purpose frontier models “learn from the internet, while Lantern learns from philanthropy.” Lantern will not reach customers until 2027, and the company has not said where it will be offered first. It will begin powering select Raiser’s Edge NXT and Agents for Good capabilities in 2027, with broader availability planned across Platform for Good; Blackbaud has not published a launch date, pricing or a list of countries, and management did not say whether availability would come in the first or second half of 2027. Blackbaud says Lantern combines leading open-weight models, running on the Databricks Data + AI Platform, with its own 40+ years of sector experience, and is post-trained on “synthetic scenarios” modelled on Blackbaud’s Social Impact Signal Graph. Gianoni said Lantern does not use customer-specific data.