Anthropic Acquires Stainless
103 points by tomeraberbach 2 hours ago | 59 comments

drewda 42 minutes ago
> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

For better or worse, it's an acquihire.

reply
atomicthumbs 27 minutes ago
"Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API."

not anymore lol

reply
btown 16 minutes ago
FYI the above quote is (sadly) real and is from Stainless's blog post: https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi...
reply
kristjansson 18 minutes ago
Some clarity about existing users/SDKs would go a long way. Otherwise this reads like "we just bought OpenAI's front door and we're EOLing it. Hopefully no one was planning to use it in the future". Petty and pointless.
reply
btown 15 minutes ago
Via https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi... that's exactly what seems to have happened:

> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

> If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish.

reply
dgellow 12 minutes ago
If you have an account you can go to https://app.stainless.com/transition. The team spent a good amount of time working on a way for customers to switch to self-service
reply
abr0ahm 2 minutes ago
Does anyone have a good guess as to the strategic reasoning behind this?

I know that common reasons for acquisitions are IP, talent, or reducing competition.

It seems like IP can't be the reason here. How is this strategically advantageous to Anthropic?

reply
pplante 48 minutes ago
I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.
reply
asdff 35 minutes ago
This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.
reply
dgellow 32 minutes ago
Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
reply
pitched 27 minutes ago
The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
reply
999900000999 7 minutes ago
Exactly. The goal of any VC by definition is to return a positive return on investment. I guess you might have a handful of exceptions, funds that are environmentally conscious, but profit remains paramount.
reply
dgellow 24 minutes ago
I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan
reply
vincnetas 21 minutes ago
Yeah, but they now have new owner who might be having different plan.
reply
renegade-otter 9 minutes ago
The plan can change with the right amount of money. Just ask OpenAI.
reply
throawayonthe 8 minutes ago
the plan isn't really up to the recipient of VC money lol
reply
iamkrazy 20 minutes ago
You forgot this: "trust me bro".
reply
noir_lord 28 minutes ago
That was always going to be the end point.

The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear.

It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.

reply
MangoCoffee 17 minutes ago
Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.
reply
nielsbot 42 minutes ago
I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...
reply
Analemma_ 38 minutes ago
I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.
reply
airstrike 26 minutes ago
No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.

Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation.

Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.

reply
nijave 34 minutes ago
Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness

Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities

reply
dgellow 33 minutes ago
Just want to take this moment to say thank you to all the customers I had the opportunity to interact with during my time at Stainless as I expect lots of them are likely to be active in this thread. It has been an honor to work with you all and none of what happened over the past 4 years would have been possible without your trust and support
reply
dalbaugh 17 minutes ago
You guys should be proud - it was a great service!
reply
doctorpangloss 15 minutes ago
stainless is a great piece of software. it was a really good risk to try to make a business out of openapi generators' maintainers not having enough time to fix bugs. everybody benefits. it sounds like nothing but similar ideas - like uv - save me time every day and turn me into an evangelist.
reply
tomeraberbach 2 hours ago
reply
jwr 38 minutes ago
I can't find the word "journey" — I'm disappointed.
reply
plumeria 24 minutes ago
<joke>“Journey” was probably removed as a non-load-bearing buzzword during the acquisition due diligence.</joke>
reply
applfanboysbgon 7 minutes ago
I had never heard of Stainless, but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill open source software at their whim. First Bun, and now this. It's one thing for a corporation to do it with their own money, because at some point the board will ask them why they're wasting money. But Anthropic isn't even profitable. They're doing this with billions of dollars of borrowed money. Same thing with OpenAI committing to an unholy amount of RAM supply and directly causing the 5x price jump, with money they don't have.

I don't understand how investors continue to fund this nonsense. Anthropic wasting money on this should be an overwhelmingly strong signal that the AGI hyoe is blatant fraud and that software engineers are clearly not replaceable if they have to buy them for some tertiary, fifth-order concern so far removed from their main business. Yet they just keep getting more and more money dumped on them.

reply
n3storm 6 minutes ago
Wait Stainless is not a Rust company???
reply
tehalex 46 minutes ago
OpenAI uses stainless for at least some of their SDKs.
reply
firtoz 19 minutes ago
I guess they'll be able to vibecode a replacement pretty quickly

I hope they make it open source!

reply
nomel 41 minutes ago
Third sentence in the article:

> Founded in 2022, Stainless has powered the generation of every official Anthropic SDK since the earliest days of our API.

edit: bah. no more HN before coffee.

reply
djm_ 32 minutes ago
OpenAI is not Anthropic, the original comment is valid.

Anthropic have bought out a tool their competitor used too, they even have an OpenAI case study still on the Stainless website.

reply
kristjansson 31 minutes ago
> Anthropic

GP:

> OpenAI

??

reply
deaton 5 minutes ago
This makes sense, since their business model is built on Steeling everyone's data and feeding it to a monster.
reply
jypepin 27 minutes ago
I worked with Alex (founder of stainless) at Stripe and he's awesome. Happy for him and well deserved. Congrats Alex! :)
reply
dgellow 17 minutes ago
I met him via HN, and somehow got the opportunity to work closely with him on Stainless since the very early days, I can confirm he is awesome! He did such a fantastic work building the team and developing a very unique culture of excellence and kindness
reply
dzonga 15 minutes ago
if u can't replace the tools, then acquire the tool makers & shut down the tools.
reply
jonplackett 22 minutes ago
Are they buying these for the tech, the people or to prevent supply chain hacks?
reply
pixel_popping 60 minutes ago
Anthropic, it would be nice to actually put a link to the website.
reply
dalbaugh 39 minutes ago
I'm really disappointed that such a great service is getting taken off the market. Happy for their team, but sad for the ecosystem.

This has to be somewhat anti-competitive. Why else sunset the SDK generator service but to hurt any other company (OpenAI, etc) who relies on these for their SDKs?

reply
alwillis 8 minutes ago
> This has to be somewhat anti-competitive.

I don’t think so. They were available to anyone with the money and Anthropic acted first.

I doubt attempting to hurt OpenAI was the primary reason for the acquisition.

Maybe it’s different now; Bill Gates “wanting to cutoff Netscape’s air supply” and threatening to cancel the Windows license of PC manufacturers who shipped Netscape’s browser on their PCs… now that’s anticompetitive. They had 95% market share.

Bill was like “That's a nice PC business you have there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”

reply
repeekad 12 minutes ago
Surely part of the value is the talent, the rest comes from removing a tool like this from the open market? I wonder how much of each went into the final valuation.
reply
dalbaugh 9 minutes ago
Oh definitely - the talent at Stainless is incredible. Not trying to take away from that at all.
reply
phildougherty 54 minutes ago
Whats the connection that got them the early in with anthropic?
reply
embedding-shape 52 minutes ago
A useful product that developers who want some easy SDKs across a bunch of languages use?
reply
dgellow 40 minutes ago
Yes, but not only the pure SDK generation. The vision has always been to develop a platform that manages the end-to-end release process. In the case of Anthropic and other enterprise customers we also worked closely with their teams on their API and SDKs design, such as the development of the various streaming helpers
reply
alexarena 42 minutes ago
Brian Krausz
reply
asdev 46 minutes ago
I'm guessing it'll be something around spinning up MCPs easily as an evolution of their product. Just right place, right time
reply
ezekg 25 minutes ago
Now if only we had a service that could generate OpenAPI specs automatically...
reply
supriyo-biswas 12 minutes ago
The OpenAPI autogenerated clients kinda suck though.

My preferred approach for doing this is to have a hand-rolled SDK generator that reads the request, response and error models out of the microservice project and emits the same in each language targeted by the SDK, along with a minimal stub that calls the API.

You then spend 15 minutes at most, customizing the stub if needed, if you need custom behaviours like streaming.

reply
ezekg 4 minutes ago
Not talking about the generated clients, I'm talking about the spec itself. If the majority of API services don't even have an OpenAPI spec, they can't use tools like Stainless even if they wanted to. A lot is being left on the table by not working on that first issue: companies don't have an OpenAPI spec.

Been on my mind to explore that issue, because I run one of those API services that don't have an OpenAPI spec, but I have other priorities pulling my attention away from that idea. I just wish it was all handled.

reply
rcarmo 44 minutes ago
This feels like the Apple playbook, but for software tooling--they are becoming vertically integrated.
reply
asim 49 minutes ago
Good for them. We built similar tooling at that time, but backed by our own APIs. It's something that has a lot of value, that standardisation needs to exist, but it also makes a lot of sense to fold the team into a company like Anthropic that is so developer centric. Good luck to the team there.
reply
lukassbrad 4 minutes ago
[flagged]
reply
kramit1288 8 minutes ago
[dead]
reply
rvz 49 minutes ago
I am going to assume that anything Anthropic acquires is going to be eventually used against you.
reply
dgellow 27 minutes ago
For what it’s worth Stainless codegen output has always been owned by customers. The SDKs won’t disappear, and the team did spend quite a lot of time to make it possible to transition to self-service. I don’t see how that could be used against you
reply
blazing234 34 minutes ago
looks like just an excuse to spend capital
reply