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?
For better or worse, it's an acquihire.
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 hype is blatant fraud and that software engineers are clearly not being replaced by Anthropic's software if they have to buy more engineers for some tertiary, fifth-order concern so far removed from their main line of business. Yet they just keep getting more and more money dumped on them.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.”
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.
not anymore lol
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.
Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities
I hope they make it open source!
By self-service, do you mean that the SDK generators are now source-available so they can be run by end users locally?
> 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.
Anthropic have bought out a tool their competitor used too, they even have an OpenAI case study still on the Stainless website.
GP:
> OpenAI
??
The frontier of AI is shifting from models that answer to agents that act—and agents are only as capable as the systems they can reach. Today, Anthropic is acquiring Stainless, a leader in SDKs and MCP server tooling, to extend that reach even further.
Founded in 2022, Stainless has powered the generation of every official Anthropic SDK since the earliest days of our API. 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. Stainless turns an API spec into SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, and more. Each one is fast, reliable, and built to feel native in its language.
“Stainless has shaped how developers experience the Claude API since the start, and it’s been great to work with them on that,” said Katelyn Lesse, Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic. “Agents are only as useful as what they can connect to. We’re excited to bring the Stainless team into Anthropic to advance Claude’s ability to connect to data and tools.”
“I started Stainless because SDKs deserve as much care as the APIs they wrap. Anthropic was one of the first teams to bet on this with us,” said Alex Rattray, Founder and CEO of Stainless. “We have been watching what developers have built on Claude over the last few years, which made bringing our teams together an easy decision. The team gets to keep doing the work we love, on the platform where it matters most.”
Anthropic created MCP to make agent connectivity possible. By bringing together the Stainless and Anthropic teams, the Claude Platform continues to push the frontier of developer experience and agent connectivity.
PwC will roll out Claude Code and Cowork starting with U.S. teams and expanding toward a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of professionals, establish a joint Center of Excellence, and train and certify 30,000 PwC professionals on Claude.
We're launching Claude for Small Business, a package of connectors and ready-to-run workflows that put Claude inside the tools small businesses use every day.