Anthropic acquires Stainless and plans to shut down its hosted tools

In short: Anthropic has acquired Stainless, a developer tools startup, and Stainless will wind down all of its hosted products.

What happened

Anthropic said it has acquired Stainless, a New York based startup founded in 2022. Anthropic did not share the price or other deal terms.

Stainless makes tools that help companies create and maintain SDKs, short for software development kits. An SDK is like a ready made set of parts and instructions that helps programmers connect their app to another company’s service, similar to using an official adapter instead of wiring things by hand.

Stainless became well known because its software can take an API specification and automatically produce SDKs in several programming languages, including Python and Java. An API is a set of rules for how software talks to other software, like a menu you can order from. Stainless also updates those SDKs as the underlying APIs change, which saves ongoing manual work.

Anthropic told TechCrunch that Stainless will wind down all hosted Stainless products, including its SDK generator. It said existing customers will still own the SDKs they have already generated, and they can modify and extend them.

Why it matters

This matters because Stainless has been used by multiple AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, to help developers connect to their services. If the hosted tools go away and future access is limited, competitors may need to replace that “adapter factory” with something else, which can slow down software updates and new features that rely on those connections.

Source: TechCrunch AI