Anthropic acquires Stainless
227 points
3 hours ago
| 40 comments
| anthropic.com
| HN
graphememes
4 minutes ago
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I've started to really dislike how anthropic is operating, not very human first or friendly

aside from that, this is literally just an openapi to sdk generator, not like openai can't just generate one

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drewda
3 hours ago
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> 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.

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atomicthumbs
2 hours ago
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"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

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windexh8er
10 minutes ago
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I'm waiting for the Enterprise space to wise up. For anyone who's ever worked with any reasonably large company as a vendor (especially a small one) you know how painful redlines in legal can be. Why TF haven't enterprise made it more painful for these events? Basically state that if the service is purchased/sold/shuttered prior to the contract expiry date that a significant penalty (e.g. full refund) is required and including some portion of investment made to onboard said service/product/tool.

I can't even imagine the money wasted on turn-and-burns in the F1000 alone. The US needs a wake up call with respect to consumer / buyer protections. The life of the snake oil salesman is plentiful these days, and you have a lot of AI-psychotic executives who can't seem to get enough.

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smrtinsert
30 minutes ago
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what is the value in destroying those relationships? I assume it was acquisition to defend against another company owning a key part of their delivery pipeline, but killing the public product is just bad press.
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paulddraper
2 hours ago
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That is WILD to put those statements together in the same article.
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embedding-shape
1 hour ago
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What's WILD is people ending up relying on these essentially startup-slops that just serves to give you future technical debt once you have to eventually moved away because they got acquired by $INSERT_BAD_GUY_OF_THE_MONTH
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shimman
1 hour ago
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The only people "relying" on this are other startups whose VC benefactors force them to use other products under their portfolio in order to goose up their numbers.
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b65e8bee43c2ed0
45 minutes ago
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that makes so much sense. I always wondered how the fuck did all those ZIRP era "hello world as a service" bullshit startups have any customers at all.
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CityOfThrowaway
30 minutes ago
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I've raised venture from a lot of the big firms (and a lot of small firms) and have never had any of them attempt to force me to use anything.
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windexh8er
5 minutes ago
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You may not even see it. I worked in a startup whose founder had money dipped into about a dozen products in the cyber security vertical. Many of those startups, I later found out, had access or used products from others in his portfolio. Basically taking $50k and cycling it through all of them buying something from the other one. I doubt it was a money laundering scheme, but it sure was convenient to just add logos of "customers" to the Nascar pitch slide.
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gneray
20 minutes ago
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+1
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jMyles
57 minutes ago
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It may be that there are many projects relying on Stainless, or, as a sibling comment points out, it may be portfolio-based stack selection rather than actual feature dependence.

Either way, it does seem irresponsible and tone deaf for an acquiring/hiring company and an acquired/hired company to send these conflicting signals. If one puts oneself out there as dependable in the face hopes and needs of other, smaller, up-and-coming projects, then a rapid wind-down for $ is incongruent with such a posture.

So much so that, at least for my part, I'd be quite reluctant to hire someone who had engaged in this sort of bob-and-weave pursuit.

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mcintyre1994
1 hour ago
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They didn’t. The first is from the Stainless blog post, the second is from Anthropic’s.
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btown
2 hours ago
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FYI the above quote is (sadly) real and is from Stainless's blog post: https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi...
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layer8
1 hour ago
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A Stainless steal? ;)
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gen220
52 minutes ago
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Wow, OpenAI is a stainless customer right?
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gizmodo59
2 hours ago
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Anthropic is getting extremely petty and especially against oai

- ad in superbowl about how they are the good guys.

- dow public PR stunt (they are the ones to give Palantir their model access).

- sues openclaw.

- threatens every use of cc in oss community.

- prevents other companies using claude saying they cant use when they compete.

- never released a single open weight model.

- Dario told OAI is Yolo'ing in compute and they are now doing the same.

- gas lighting developers and then after weeks acknowledging they fiddled with reasoning juice.

- fear mongoring on mythos and then geting compute later and acknowledging publicly once they realized its not significantly better than gpt 5.5 cyber.

- signs a deal with Elon!

- now this!

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urams
1 hour ago
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It should be noted that this user is basically an OAI shill account. You can look through their history to see this quite clearly.

Anecdata, but I have a friend at OAI who claims that on both twitter and HN there is mild coordination of OAI employees to signal boost pro-OAI and anti-competitor messaging.

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nicce
22 minutes ago
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Does it matter? What of their claims were false? You should undo the claims, not attack the account.
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BeetleB
6 minutes ago
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The deeper issue is that the comment isn't adding anything to the conversation. It's simply a list of criticisms about Anthropic. If it were an analysis of why this acquisition is so bad, I'd agree with your stance. But the only thing the comment appears to do is try to make them look bad.
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whimsicalism
21 minutes ago
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> threatens every use of cc in oss community.

well that ones obviously patently false

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BowBun
5 minutes ago
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> Does it matter?

It sure does, readers should be informed of who says what. The speaker and their history is part of full communication, not just the words.

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jrsj
1 hour ago
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It’s gotten better within the last month or so but historically there’s been an excessive amount of anti-OAI and pro-Anthropic activity on this site as well and I’ve seen numerous posts get downvoted and almost instantly flagged for calling this out more politely than you have here.

So at least anecdotally I really don’t think it’s fair to portray this as OAI doing some sort of social media psyop as if others aren’t engaged in similar behavior.

It’s also very possible that this user just has opinions and tends to think OAI is more developer friendly / that Anthropic is hostile to developers (which is common sentiment I’ve seen from many real people who are definitely not paid OAI shills or something)

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solenoid0937
56 minutes ago
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IDK if I'd call it "better."

HN did a massive 180 in the last month or two, and nearly every post or comment related to Anthropic is just a hate post.

The amount of anger against Anthropic on HN doesn't reflect anything I see in reality (and I work at a pretty big FAANG with Codex and Claude Code, both are great) so I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.

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wiether
21 minutes ago
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  > I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.
That is a very HN-minded comment.

Sure, there's probably some accounts that are more or less controlled by the big AI labs here.

But looking at how humans have been acting for the last 20 years, you'll see that you don't need to pay people to promote things. They'll do it freely, because they identify with it and they can't fathom other people not agreeing with them.

Do you really thing that the weekly posts about people dropping AWS for Hetzner are paid by the German company?

No.

People have limited time and money. Some picked Claude, others picked Codex. Claude seems to be the most popular in terms of content produced about it. So some people probably picked Codex just because they don't want to be like everyone else. Then they obviously have to talk down about Claude, because if Codex is not better, then they are not. Simple.

And from my POV that's not a good thing because HN was the place where people didn't act like this. It was pragmatism and honest debate.

Now it's becoming: my agent is better than X, my stack is better than Y...

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tinyhouse
56 minutes ago
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OpenAI and Anthropic are both private companies with lots of individual investors such as employees, secondary-market buyers, and so on, who stand to become multi-millionaires. So most of what you read about them here is probably colored by someone's financial interests. Not that it's gonna make a difference, but people are just being people.
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cactusplant7374
1 hour ago
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Let's talk specifics. Codex limits are very generous and developers care greatly about access to affordable compute.
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bastawhiz
1 hour ago
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That's like rewinding to 2015 and saying "Uber prices [versus Lyft] are very fair and riders care greatly about access to affordable transportation"
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cactusplant7374
41 minutes ago
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I'm living the day. Whatever happens next is unpredictable. But Codex surely is the best value today.
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solenoid0937
1 hour ago
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Let's not pretend that any company will keep unsustainable limits forever. You can go to codex for free compute; they will enshittify the moment they build a meaningful lead over their competitors

After seeing the whole internet being enshittified I'm still shocked people don't see through these very transparent tactics that every tech company has employed since 2012 or so.

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jrsj
1 hour ago
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This is true of course and I don’t think these heavily subsidized plans will be around forever, but at the same time OpenAI is just less compute constrained than Anthropic right now as well so they’re in a stronger position to be able to offer these subsidies.

GPT models are also generally more token efficient right now and that helps too — you can go a lot further on a $20 subscription with Codex than Claude Code as a result of this.

Ultimately I think many day to day tasks just need to shift away from the latest frontier models towards models that are faster, cheaper, and still perform well enough & you can phase out subsidies while keeping total cost reasonable.

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solenoid0937
52 minutes ago
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Ever since limits were doubled I never really ran into them on Claude code, but I get where you're coming from.

Personally if I don't need a frontier model I use a local LLM. Or one of the Chinese ones through OpenRouter.

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cactusplant7374
40 minutes ago
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I care about the compute I can access today.
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paxys
1 hour ago
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How is this acquisition relevant to OpenAI or anything else you said?
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hobofan
1 hour ago
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All main OpenAI SDK libraries are made with stainless[0][1].

[0]: https://github.com/openai/openai-python

[1]: https://github.com/openai/openai-node

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preommr
39 minutes ago
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> dow

I was wondering what the Dow jones stock index thing was...

It took me a minute, but I am guessing this means department of war? It feels strange to see terminology evolve like this over my lifetime.

At first I thought this might've been a 'freedom fries' thing, but I guess it's pretty official now.

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nerdsniper
20 minutes ago
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It's not official. It's literally the same thing as 'freedom fries'. The executive branch can't rename the Department of Defense, only Congress can, and they haven't. The instant Trump leaves office, the only people who will still refer to it as the DoW will be die-hard 'Trumpers'.
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unethical_ban
24 minutes ago
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The mistyped DoD, because there is no Department of War.
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embedding-shape
1 hour ago
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Maybe you're right about the rest, but about the topic, how does "this!" equal to Anthopic being petty against OpenAI? Is OpenAI using Stainless a lot already, or is it something else? Your comment seems to be missing how the first and last line are related. FWIW, I don't think anyone involved here is "the good guys".
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hobofan
1 hour ago
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All main OpenAI SDK libraries are made with stainless[0][1].

[0]: https://github.com/openai/openai-python

[1]: https://github.com/openai/openai-node

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regexorcist
1 hour ago
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Yeah it's crazy how they're burning developer goodwill. I've personally cancelled and resent them for not being able to delete my claude code session (that button was misteriously the only one in the UI to throw an error, I tried every day for two weeks).
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max__dev
1 hour ago
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Had to turn off adblock to delete my sessions (firefox, ublock) Seems to be daisy chained through their telemetry service. Kinda bizarre.
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conradfr
36 minutes ago
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There's no bug in any Claude products. After all, it's entirely coded by Claude Code.
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axpy906
1 hour ago
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You know that’s probably just a Db flag right? They will persist your data unless it’s zdr
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smith7018
36 minutes ago
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They didn't sue OpenClaw; they sent a C&D over the name. That's how trademark law works. If they didn't defend their name then anyone can use it.
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ipaddr
17 minutes ago
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I can live with those but not their token cost.
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AlexCoventry
1 hour ago
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> signs a deal with Elon!

Expect grok to improve dramatically as Musk reverse-engineers the Anthropic services running on his hardware.

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whimsicalism
47 minutes ago
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Curious - are you affiliated with OpenAI?
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xvector
49 minutes ago
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For some reason I don't see you calling OAI petty when they donated $20M to Trump & worked a secret deal with Hegseth to usurp Anthropic and erase the red lines they had in place.

Starting a race to the bottom where every AI company agrees to "all lawful use" such as mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, probably increasing p(doom) by some amount.

All to stick it to Anthropic. That's not petty to you?

To me it is an order of magnitude bigger than all of the stuff you've described. I suspect some people here just work for OAI.

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PunchTornado
1 hour ago
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Oai deserves everything bad that happens to them.
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bko
1 hour ago
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Why? They started the whole chatbot paradigm. They took the leap and are very generous with free tiers.

I know people are upset about the non-profit thing but the fact is that was pretty much the only way forward if they wanted to have LLMs have the impact that they are having today. It's very much a question if they'll ever turn a profit. But overall I'm grateful OpenAI had the vision to get this ball rolling when companies like Google have been sitting on this for nearly a decade and were too afraid to invest a tiny portion of their billions to bring this to fruition because they were afraid of either cannibalization of their search business or offending a vocal minority of internet people.

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650REDHAIR
58 minutes ago
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Because Altman is an objectively bad person, mostly.
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AlexCoventry
1 hour ago
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They jumped into a contract with Hegseth, after Hegseth made it abundantly clear through his negotiations with Anthropic that any counterparty of his would have to assist with domestic mass surveillance and unsupervised lethal autonomous weapons, or face severe penalties.
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tpm
1 hour ago
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They support Trump.
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sunnybeetroot
2 hours ago
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Where did they acknowledge publicly mythos was fear mongered? Grok returned no evidence.
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OsrsNeedsf2P
1 hour ago
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Maybe you should ask Grok to explain what GP said
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kristjansson
2 hours ago
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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.
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btown
2 hours ago
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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.

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dgellow
2 hours ago
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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
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arjvik
2 hours ago
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I don't have an account but my colleauges do as my company uses the platform.

By self-service, do you mean that the SDK generators are now source-available so they can be run by end users locally?

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benesch
2 hours ago
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Yes, that’s right.
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lapusta
6 minutes ago
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I don't think the generators themselves were open-sourced (only the SDKs were already open-source). That leaves three main options:

* Manual Maintenance: Returning to the pre-Stainless era.

* Agentic Coding: Works to an extent, but you lose the deterministic, review-free output required to keep an SDK perfectly structured and coherent.

* Open-source Generators: Helpful for basic use cases, but they lack Stainless's full-stack features like multi-language generation and publishing, MCPs, and documentation.

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nightpool
44 minutes ago
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That would be great to lead with since it's not present in any of the blog post communication anywhere.
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kristjansson
2 hours ago
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I'm viewing this as a user of non-Ant Stainless SDKs. I don't have an account or relationship with you guys, and thanks to your (excellent!) product, the surfaces I contact don't have a direct dependence on your services. But that surface is intimately informed by the nuances of your product! It'd be nice to allay (or confirm) people's fears about how this might impact your other prominent users!
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dgellow
2 hours ago
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Good point. FWIW if anyone reading this is a stainless user and is concerned about their situation you can reach out to transition@stainless.com. I check with the team if they can update the article with a mention
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britannio
1 hour ago
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Is this public? I'm interested in trying it.
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GeneticGenesis
2 hours ago
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Congrats to the team at Stainless, it's a great team to be joining over at Anthropic.

We were an ealy adopter of their Node SDK generator at Mux (and latterly their Typescript and other generators), and the product worked great, and I'm sad to see it be shut down.

At the same time, it's easy to understand why this is a complciated product/market to be in at the moment - it's very tempting and easy to vibe code SDKs from a OpenAPI spec files right now. I would think a lot of teams will just go in that direction (for better or worse), using the same toolchain that the product developers are using today for the product, for effectively no extra cost.

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pplante
3 hours ago
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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.
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asdff
3 hours ago
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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.
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deaton
2 hours ago
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Tale as old as the word "startup" even. Uber/Lyft did it with taxis. DoorDash did it with food delivery. You run at a loss for years while destroying your legacy competition by just outlasting them, then once you have cornered the market you squeeze.
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dgellow
1 hour ago
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I understand the cynism but it’s not the case here. Stainless isn't a case of blitzscaling or running a loss for years to destroy the competition. The motto of the company is polished and robust and we invested a lot into generating what we think are the highest quality SDKs available. We could have shipped things way, way faster if the focus on design and quality wasn’t such an essential part of the development process
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deaton
44 minutes ago
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No but Anthropic and OpenAI are very much trying to use their positions to destroy everyone's ability to do things without their product, make AI essential, and then jack prices. Thats the only way this becomes profitable.
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bornfreddy
39 minutes ago
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It's not about Stainless, it's about Anthropic.
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abigail95
1 hour ago
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Now Uber is profitable what stops a taxi from just competing again, forcing Uber to have to be unprofitable again?
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fragmede
1 hour ago
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Skill issue. Taxi companies aren't able to innovate and adapt and improve, despite the competition from Uber, preferring instead to use lobbying and regulations too survive in a post-Uber world.
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asdff
40 minutes ago
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Actually, it is a marketing issue. Taxis did innovate and did improve and imo are a better product than uber today. They have an app that is no different than what you expect with rideshare apps. Actually it is better, I can schedule a ride and get a flat rate with tip already baked in to places like the airport. No need to fret about surge prices at all, what I see when I schedule it today is what I pay when it comes tomorrow or next week or next month, whenever I've scheduled it.

But, no one uses it, because uber and lyft have become kleenex or coca cola: the brand name associated with the basic phenomenon, such that consumers cannot even think about the phenomenon without thinking first of the brand and probably resorting to the brand.

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avgDev
1 hour ago
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I'm reading "enshitification", and it describes this cycle of first losing money but acquiring customers, then switching focus to catering to businesses, then to themselves and at that point the tool is not what it was supposedly intended to be.

This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.

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zackify
2 hours ago
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and this is why i use pi.dev and hotswap models and have no reliance on a single provider
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dgellow
3 hours ago
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Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
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pitched
2 hours ago
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The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
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999900000999
2 hours ago
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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.
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dgellow
2 hours ago
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I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan
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vincnetas
2 hours ago
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Yeah, but they now have new owner who might be having different plan.
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kuboble
2 hours ago
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But I think that doesn't matter.

If you intend to sell it to the highest bidder eventually then what difference does it make what was your plan?

If a business had real values then they would never sell out (see lichess).

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cdata
2 hours ago
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With respect, you were manipulated (either by founders or by investors). Startups leverage employees' pro-social leanings to make them feel good about a fundamentally anti-social enterprise.
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solenoid0937
59 minutes ago
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HN cracks me up sometimes. Anthropic is anti-social? Stainless devs don't want their pre IPO equity to do well? Okay.

I very much doubt you would apply your expectation of altruism to yourself!

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rockinghigh
1 hour ago
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Why wouldn't getting more customers the plan? Anthropic doesn't acquire companies to have a lower market share. There is clearly a consolidation and a rush to get as much of the developer market as possible.
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renegade-otter
2 hours ago
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The plan can change with the right amount of money. Just ask OpenAI.
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throawayonthe
2 hours ago
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the plan isn't really up to the recipient of VC money lol
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iamkrazy
2 hours ago
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You forgot this: "trust me bro".
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allknowingfrog
1 hour ago
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Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.

It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?

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MangoCoffee
2 hours ago
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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.
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noir_lord
2 hours ago
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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.

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scottcha
2 hours ago
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I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.
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geodel
1 hour ago
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True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".
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nielsbot
3 hours ago
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I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...
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Analemma_
3 hours ago
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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.
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airstrike
2 hours ago
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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.

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nijave
3 hours ago
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Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness

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

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wubwubwomp
1 hour ago
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As a Stainless customer, this is frustrating!

I get that most of our new customers will use AI to generate client libs. But our existing customer base depends on our Stainless generated client libs. These OpenAPI schema > client lib providers had a bit of lockin since the client libs are all slightly different.

Migration's unfortunately not as easy as just switching to Speakeasy or Openapi generator w/o breaking existing customers.

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tomeraberbach
3 hours ago
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jwr
3 hours ago
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I can't find the word "journey" — I'm disappointed.
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wiether
19 minutes ago
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Don't stop believin'!
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plumeria
2 hours ago
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<joke>“Journey” was probably removed as a non-load-bearing buzzword during the acquisition due diligence.</joke>
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geodel
1 hour ago
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Well nowadays also there are no "force for good", "joining forces", "democratization" and so on. Times have truly changed.
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orliesaurus
12 minutes ago
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I don't understand why they would buy this company?

Was stainless doing great? Was stainless doing not great? Did they just want to hire some extra skilled engineers? Did they hire them so OpenAI's SDKs are gonna have a setback?

Mmmh

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dgellow
3 hours ago
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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
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LatticeAnimal
2 hours ago
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Have you considered open sourcing the SDK generator as part of the shutdown of stainless services?
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dalbaugh
2 hours ago
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You guys should be proud - it was a great service!
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doctorpangloss
2 hours ago
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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.
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jviotti
56 minutes ago
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I'm finding these acquisitions (or acquihire?) are interesting. First Bun, and then Stainless. It's almost like Anthropic wanted to acquire every company that develops foundational technology that they themselves use.

Assuming they bet on Claude getting much better at coding over time, couldn't they themselves cover their own needs with technology that they built themselves?

Is some sort of autonomy over technology they use somehow the goal here?

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m3h
1 hour ago
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Congratulations to the Stainless team for their hardwork.

We are offering a 50% off for the first year subscription price at www.apimatic.io for companies impacted by this.

If you're looking for a solid long term SDK and docs partner, APIMatic is the OG CodeGen serving companies like PayPal, Maxio and PayQuicker for the past 10 years.

Reach out to mehdi@apimatic.io and I'll help you migrate.

PS: sorry for the shameless plug but sdks and APIs are my life and blood :-)

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nightski
26 minutes ago
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Why can't they just partner with these companies? Why do they have to take all these products, open source projects, etc.. and just destroy all that value?
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tehalex
3 hours ago
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OpenAI uses stainless for at least some of their SDKs.
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firtoz
2 hours ago
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I guess they'll be able to vibecode a replacement pretty quickly

I hope they make it open source!

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postalcoder
2 hours ago
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from the very beginning. i remember going through their code and seeing stainless all over the comments. great marketing.
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nomel
3 hours ago
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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.

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djm_
3 hours ago
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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.

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kristjansson
3 hours ago
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> Anthropic

GP:

> OpenAI

??

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serbrech
33 minutes ago
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Here is a powerful OSS extensible alternative from Microsoft. It’s what generates all azure SDKs, docs, CLIs now, and it’s really good.

https://typespec.io/

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abr0ahm
2 hours ago
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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?

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jypepin
2 hours ago
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I worked with Alex (founder of stainless) at Stripe and he's awesome. Happy for him and well deserved. Congrats Alex! :)
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dgellow
2 hours ago
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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
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applfanboysbgon
2 hours ago
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I had never heard of Stainless, but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill 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 purchasing 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 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.

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BeetleB
8 seconds ago
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> but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this.

It almost sounds like you want Lina Khan back :-D

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tosti
2 hours ago
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It's the developers of Carmageddon.
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kgeist
1 hour ago
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Stainless and Stainless Games seem to be 2 unrelated companies.
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pjmlp
38 minutes ago
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Can't wait for everything to go bum, and finally get to use only what is relevant.
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gjtorikian
2 hours ago
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Utterly shameless plug, but recently at WorkOS I open sourced our OpenAPI spec to SDK pipeline: https://workos.com/blog/handwritten-sdks-are-dead

We evaluated Stainless & Fern for our 8+ languages but ultimately I couldn’t justify the cost nor ceding control to another organization for something as important as platform DX.

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philfreo
2 hours ago
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We evaluated Stainless, Fern [1], and a few others for Docs & SDKs (soon, CLI) and ended up choosing Fern. Definitely glad we did after today's news. Hadn't seen WorkOS's work here though - thanks for sharing.

[1] https://buildwithfern.com/

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ZeroCool2u
1 hour ago
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Interestingly, Anthropic uses Mintlify for their docs. Not Stainless. Obviously, the focus is on SDK generation, but still strange.
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segphault
43 minutes ago
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Anthropic uses Stainless Docs for the API reference. It’s a custom integration that embeds the Stainless Docs react components directly in the Claude dashboard application.

(I worked on the Stainless Docs product at Stainless and implemented support for Anthropic’s embedding use case)

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shaneos
1 hour ago
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Anthropic technically use the Stainless docs platform for their docs, in that it’s all rendered by Stainless components. They just don’t use the full suite of Stainless tools for docs. The ability to use as little or as much as you like was a great feature of the Stainless docs product
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pier25
50 minutes ago
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Rust rewrite coming up in a week
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dzonga
2 hours ago
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if u can't replace the tools, then acquire the tool makers & shut down the tools.
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12_throw_away
2 hours ago
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Hmm. I thought we didn't need libraries or tooling anymore and "AI" could just create everything we needed? I've even been assured that we don't even need programming languages anymore, the LLMs can just write whatever we need in assembly.

Hmm.

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n3storm
2 hours ago
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Wait Stainless is not a Rust company???
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mirekrusin
1 hour ago
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Worry not, it's just Monday.
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layer8
1 hour ago
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How could it possibly be?
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dalbaugh
3 hours ago
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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?

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repeekad
2 hours ago
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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.
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dalbaugh
2 hours ago
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Oh definitely - the talent at Stainless is incredible. Not trying to take away from that at all.
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alwillis
2 hours ago
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> 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.”

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pixel_popping
3 hours ago
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Anthropic, it would be nice to actually put a link to the website.
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jonplackett
2 hours ago
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Are they buying these for the tech, the people or to prevent supply chain hacks?
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ajyoon
22 minutes ago
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Acquihire, with a side of shutting down a vendor that OpenAI prominently uses
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phildougherty
3 hours ago
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Whats the connection that got them the early in with anthropic?
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embedding-shape
3 hours ago
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A useful product that developers who want some easy SDKs across a bunch of languages use?
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dgellow
3 hours ago
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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
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alexarena
3 hours ago
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Brian Krausz
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asdev
3 hours ago
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I'm guessing it'll be something around spinning up MCPs easily as an evolution of their product. Just right place, right time
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mikdan
1 hour ago
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Hopefully Stainless' products will remain available to customers in some form, rather than having them hogged for internal use. Give it time, not all is lost.
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rvz
3 hours ago
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I am going to assume that anything Anthropic acquires is going to be eventually used against you.
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dgellow
2 hours ago
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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
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asim
3 hours ago
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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.
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____tom____
2 hours ago
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You can't rely on commercial offerings anymore. They vanish with increasing frequency.

Yet another reason to use open source.

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applfanboysbgon
1 hour ago
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Open source software isn't meaningfully insulated from this. Anthropic purchased Bun's maintainers as well and are effectively killing it, using it as a sacrifice to their AGI hype marketing. Could people fork it, technically yeah. Will anybody? Probably not, the original vision of Bun will probably go unmaintained while the main repo is destroyed with an AI Rust rewrite with 1m loc that no human ever read. If you were using Bun in your stack you're almost certainly going to be forced to switch to an alternative.
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ezekg
2 hours ago
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Now if only we had a service that could generate OpenAPI specs automatically...
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supriyo-biswas
2 hours ago
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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.

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ezekg
2 hours ago
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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. I just wish it was all handled.
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dgellow
2 hours ago
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I generally recommend FastAPI, their OpenAPI generation isn’t always perfect if you have very polymorphic endpoints but it is really good compared to other tools I experienced. And is just a neat library that has been battle tested
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pivoshenko
1 hour ago
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Wow
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jqdsouza
2 hours ago
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congrats stainless team!
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blazing234
3 hours ago
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looks like just an excuse to spend capital
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deyane
1 hour ago
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Hi
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AIorNot
44 minutes ago
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Stainless has 93 people: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stainless-api/people/

It's funny that Anthropic needs to spend millions acquiring a dev doc platform, can't they just vibe code something up with Mythos a few junior devs at Anthropic?

We have Dario claiming SWE development is obsolete and both OpenAI and Anthropic and big tech bros like Musk are still spending millions like this..

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rcarmo
3 hours ago
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This feels like the Apple playbook, but for software tooling--they are becoming vertically integrated.
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deaton
2 hours ago
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This makes sense, since their business model is built on Steeling everyone's data and feeding it to a monster.
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