On Monday, Anthropic revealed that it has purchased Stainless, a firm started by former Stripe programmer Alex Rattray, whose software is extensively utilized by competing AI laboratories, such as Google and OpenAI.
The terms of the agreement were not disclosed by Anthropic. However, The Information revealed last week that the business was negotiating a $300 million acquisition of Stainless, which is supported by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
Through the acquisition, Anthropic’s rivals will lose control of a crucial infrastructure supplier. It was informed by the firm that all hosted Stainless products, including its SDK generator, will be shut down. According to an Anthropic representative, Stainless clients will retain ownership of the SDKs they have created thus far and will be free to alter and expand them as they see fit.
Founded in 2022, the New York-based business gained notoriety in the developing AI sector by automating the development and upkeep of software development kits, or SDKs, which are libraries used by developers to communicate with APIs.
Rattray created software that could translate API specifications into SDKs that are suitable for production in a variety of programming languages, such as Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, Go, and Java. Because the platform eliminated the laborious process of manually maintaining the SDKs and updated them automatically when APIs changed, it became a popular tool.
Businesses like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Replicate, Runway, and Cloudflare that are developing AI agents that can connect to external applications and carry out tasks on behalf of consumers may find the technology very useful. Building and maintaining those relationships is made simple by Stainless’s SDK tools, but moving forward, only Anthropic will have access to them, not its rivals.
Anthropic claims that since the beginning of its API, Stainless software has driven the creation of each certified Anthropic SDK.
In a news announcement released on Monday, Rattray stated, “I started Stainless because SDKs deserve as much care as the APIs they wrap.” One of the first teams to wager on this with us was Anthropic. It was a simple decision to bring our teams together because we have been observing what developers have developed on Claude over the past few years. On the platform where it matters most, the team can continue working on the projects we love.