Anthropic announced on Monday that it has acquired Stainless, a startup founded by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray, whose software is widely used by competing artificial intelligence labs, including OpenAI and Google.
Anthropic did not disclose terms of the deal. However, the information was mentioned Last week the company was in talks to acquire Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz-backed Stainless for more than $300 million.
The acquisition will take a key infrastructure supplier out of the hands of Anthropic’s competitors. The company told TechCrunch that it will stop all hosted Stainless productsincluding the SDK generator. An Anthropic spokesperson said Stainless customers will still own the SDKs they’ve built to date and have full rights to modify and extend them as they wish.
The New York-based startup, founded in 2022, emerged in the emerging AI industry for automating the creation and maintenance of software development kits, or SDKs — the libraries that developers use to interact with APIs.
Rattray developed software that could take API specifications and turn them into production-ready SDKs in several programming languages, including Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, Go, and Java. It became a popular tool because the platform automatically updates SDKs as APIs change and eliminated the time-consuming process of manually maintaining them.
Technology is especially valuable for companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Replicate, Runway and Cloudflare that create AI agents that can connect with external software and complete tasks on behalf of users. Stainless’s SDK tools are an easy way to create and maintain these connections — but going forward, the tools will only be available to Anthropic, not its competitors.
According to Anthropic, Stainless software has powered the creation of every official Anthropic SDK since the early days of its API.
“I started Stainless because SDKs deserve as much care as the APIs they wrap,” said Rattray in a press release posted on Monday. “Anthropic was one of the first teams to bet on this with us. We’ve been watching what developers have built on Claude over the past few years, which made it an easy decision to bring our teams together. The team needs to keep doing the work we love, on the platform where it matters most.”
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