Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has just announced the acquisition of Stainless, a startup specializing in providing software development tools used by many technology giants such as OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare. This move is assessed to help Anthropic significantly strengthen its advantages in the race to build AI infrastructure.
Currently, the financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Previously, The Information newspaper reported that Anthropic was negotiating to buy Stainless for more than 300 million USD.
This startup has received support from many large investment funds such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Stainless was founded in New York in 2022 by Alex Rattray, former engineer of the global online payment platform and gateway Stripe.
The company quickly gained a foothold in the AI industry thanks to automation technology for creating and maintaining SDKs (software development kits). These are important libraries that help programmers connect and interact with APIs of technology platforms.
The highlight of Stainless lies in the ability to convert API specification into complete SDKs, ready for use in many programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, Go and Java.
This system can also automatically update SDKs whenever the API changes, helping businesses significantly reduce manual maintenance workloads that take a lot of time and manpower.
Thanks to that technology, Stainless has become an infrastructure partner of a series of large AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Replicate, Runway or Cloudflare.
These businesses use SDKs to build AI agents capable of connecting to external software and performing tasks on behalf of users.
However, after the deal is completed, Anthropic said it will stop all Stainless products stored on the company's server, including SDK generators. This means that tools that used to serve many competitors may only prioritize Anthropic's ecosystem in the future.
Anthropic affirms that Stainless's current customers still retain ownership of previously created SDKs and can continue to modify or expand them according to their own needs. However, technology experts believe that Anthropic's control of Stainless could create major changes in the rapidly growing AI infrastructure market.
Anthropic also revealed that Stainless's software has supported the development of the company's entire official SDK from the early days of Claude API development. This shows that the cooperative relationship between the two sides has formed early and is becoming increasingly important.
In a press release, founder Alex Rattray said he created Stainless with the desire for SDKs to be invested in as carefully as the APIs they operate. According to him, Anthropic is one of the first companies to trust and use Stainless technology.
“We have been following what developers have built on Claude in recent years. That makes the decision to merge the team very natural,” Mr. Rattray shared.
