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Posted by tomeraberbach 16 hours ago

Anthropic acquires Stainless(www.anthropic.com)
439 points | 293 commentspage 2
drchaim 9 hours ago|
X: What are you folks doing?

A: Writing docs at an SF AI company for $500k TC.

B: Designing, maintaining, and implementing all features for a platform in the IoT sector in Spain — alone — for €40,000.

A: Spain? I just bought a villa near the beach, close to Alicante. Do you know it?

B: Yes..

solenoid0937 4 hours ago|
There is a reason the EU has massive brain drain towards the US. This comes with the territory of being super unfriendly to corporations and high earners. It has its benefits too of course. Free healthcare, safety net, public transit, well maintained cities, happier median person.

While the EU does a good job optimizing life for the median person, it is a nightmare for the exceptional. It should find a way to fix this or the brain drain will continue.

gizmodo59 14 hours ago||
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!

urams 14 hours ago||
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.

nicce 13 hours ago|||
Does it matter? What of their claims were false? You should undo the claims, not attack the account.
urams 12 hours ago|||
I think you would be right if their post was substantive in relation to the topic, but it's not. It's a list of grievances almost all of which are unrelated. Despite this, it was at the top of the replies to the topic.
whimsicalism 13 hours ago||||
> threatens every use of cc in oss community.

well that ones obviously patently false

BeetleB 12 hours ago||||
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.
dasil003 11 hours ago||||
In the age of AI you can't "undo the claims" for randos on the internet. I mean it was hard enough before, but at this point it's now a direct money -> speech pipeline. Reputation will matter more than ever before.
BowBun 12 hours ago||||
> 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.

dwaltrip 10 hours ago|||
Bullshit spreads around the word before the truth can even get its shoes on. So on and so forth.

Naive credentialism is obviously bad, but reputation does matter.

embedding-shape 10 hours ago||||
> who claims that on both twitter and HN there is mild coordination of OAI employees to signal boost pro-OAI and anti-competitor messaging.

This happens for every single company that has twitter/HN/reddit users from the same company on the same platforms, I think it's also short of impossible to stop. I don't think I haven't worked in a single company in the last decade where that hasn't happened, in a range of scales.

If you weren't already, which you should have been really, you should be suspicious about anything you come across on the internet :)

jrsj 13 hours ago||||
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)

solenoid0937 13 hours ago||
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.

wiether 12 hours ago|||

  > 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...

whimsicalism 12 hours ago||
on twitter it is pretty clear that openai employees engage in coordinated messaging in a way that I haven't seen from other frontier labs. i say that as someone who prefers codex/gpt-5.5
eab- 12 hours ago||||
Honestly I expect it's just annoyed devs getting annoyed about the ratelimits on plans and post-hoc justifying. Now that Codex has far more capacity and their slot machine makes better outcomes (note: I am a heavy LLM-assisted coder) they feel like they have to justify their felt animosity towards these companies
solenoid0937 5 hours ago||
Codex and Claude don't have meaningfully different rate limits since Claude doubled theirs.

Maybe you can get more headless use out of Codex but that's not gonna last. Investors are drying up and these companies need to get to profitability.

2001zhaozhao 12 hours ago|||
Personally i've just been using Claude Code with a coding agent UI (vibe-kanban) that has wrapped over "claude -p" for more than half a year without problems. I'd only been coding interactively and well within the terms of their subscription plan. I'm not even that much of a heavy user, I'm only hitting 10-40% of my weekly quota on a given week, and I basically only use the subscription outside of what Anthropic considers peak hours.

And then I got caught in the collateral damage a few days ago when Anthropic announced changes to their subscription plan billing, just like every other user of that tool and similar tools like Conductor and Zed. So in a month I won't be able to use my Claude sub quotas for these tools, all because some other people are ruining it for everyone by using "claude -p" to run openclaw, hermes agent and autonomous dark factories that burn billions of tokens a day.

I would have been fine with the change, except Anthropic's messaging was very slimy. They tried to spin their change as a positive change even though it was clearly not for anyone who was using a "claude -p" wrapper over Claude Code for better UX. They're within their rights to change their subscription billing, but they still couldn't be honest to their own users about it. Evidently, this kind of gaslighting and PR stunts is something they've done over and over in the last few months. It just didn't impact me until this time.

I care about AI safety and it would take a lot for me to switch from Anthropic to OAI, but I just wish they were less arrogant and cared about their users more. Right now their behavior is at best selfish (or overly consequentialist, and I don't mean that in a good way), and at worst actively hurting their AI safety efforts by pushing people to open-weight model alternatives which are way more dangerous than closed models due to people being able to remove their safeguards easily.

solenoid0937 4 hours ago||
> They tried to spin their change as a positive change even though it was clearly not for anyone who was using a "claude -p" wrapper over Claude Code for better UX.

I feel like they were always fairly consistent (at least since OpenClaw came out) that wrapping claude -p in a non-Claude Code harness is disallowed by the subscription and requires using the API.

The lock-in to Claude Code is the price you pay for the subsidized tokens. If you don't want lock-in, that is what the API is for.

tinyhouse 13 hours ago||||
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.
cactusplant7374 14 hours ago||||
Let's talk specifics. Codex limits are very generous and developers care greatly about access to affordable compute.
bastawhiz 13 hours ago|||
That's like rewinding to 2015 and saying "Uber prices [versus Lyft] are very fair and riders care greatly about access to affordable transportation"
cactusplant7374 13 hours ago||
I'm living the day. Whatever happens next is unpredictable. But Codex surely is the best value today.
solenoid0937 13 hours ago|||
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.

jrsj 13 hours ago|||
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.

solenoid0937 13 hours ago||
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.

cactusplant7374 13 hours ago|||
I care about the compute I can access today.
solenoid0937 4 hours ago||
Totally understandable, but then you forgo your right to complain about enshittification tomorrow!
vips7L 11 hours ago|||
This entire forum is Anthropic or OpenAI shills.
paxys 14 hours ago|||
How is this acquisition relevant to OpenAI or anything else you said?
hobofan 13 hours ago||
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

regexorcist 14 hours ago|||
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).
max__dev 13 hours ago|||
Had to turn off adblock to delete my sessions (firefox, ublock) Seems to be daisy chained through their telemetry service. Kinda bizarre.
conradfr 13 hours ago||||
There's no bug in any Claude products. After all, it's entirely coded by Claude Code.
axpy906 14 hours ago|||
You know that’s probably just a Db flag right? They will persist your data unless it’s zdr
embedding-shape 14 hours ago|||
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".
hobofan 13 hours ago||
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

preommr 13 hours ago|||
> 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.

nerdsniper 12 hours ago|||
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'.
unethical_ban 13 hours ago|||
The mistyped DoD, because there is no Department of War.
AlexCoventry 13 hours ago|||
> signs a deal with Elon!

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

whimsicalism 13 hours ago|||
Curious - are you affiliated with OpenAI?
smith7018 13 hours ago|||
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.
pdantix 10 hours ago|||
if this is petty, then i'd love to know where openai employees having claude derangement syndrome sits on the petty scale
ipaddr 12 hours ago|||
I can live with those but not their token cost.
xvector 13 hours ago|||
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.

nkohari 11 hours ago|||
It's really insulting to the Stainless team to dismiss this acquisition as some sort of chess move against OpenAI. Give me a break.
PunchTornado 14 hours ago|||
Oai deserves everything bad that happens to them.
bko 14 hours ago|||
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.

650REDHAIR 13 hours ago|||
Because Altman is an objectively bad person, mostly.
Computer0 12 hours ago||||
They support the military industrial complex.
PunchTornado 2 hours ago||||
1. scam altman

2. non profit then for profit

3. least open ai lab there. when is the last time you read something interesting from them

4. collaboration with the military after anthropic backed out

5. scam altman

AlexCoventry 13 hours ago||||
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.
tpm 13 hours ago||||
They support Trump.
jasonmp85 14 hours ago|||
[dead]
sunnybeetroot 14 hours ago||
Where did they acknowledge publicly mythos was fear mongered? Grok returned no evidence.
OsrsNeedsf2P 14 hours ago||
Maybe you should ask Grok to explain what GP said
sunnybeetroot 5 hours ago||
I did and it couldn’t find evidence of Anthropic backtracking on Mythos fear mongering. I used Grok given it has access to all Twitter data and these kind of things would have been newsworthy on Twitter. The most I could find is this report showing Mythos isn’t any more groundbreaking that GPT 5.5. https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-openais-gpt-5...

If you or anyone had any evidence to support GP’s claim I’d love a reference to it.

serbrech 13 hours ago||
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/

rattray 10 hours ago|
TypeSpec is awesome!!

(disclaimer: founder of Stainless and also friends with creator of TypeSpec)

jypepin 15 hours ago||
I worked with Alex (founder of stainless) at Stripe and he's awesome. Happy for him and well deserved. Congrats Alex! :)
flog 11 hours ago||
I worked with both Alex (stainless) and Jarred (bun) at Stripe, and they were both notable for their high energy and output. I did find it amusing that Anthropic picked both the Xtripes up and wonder how many Xtripes at at Anthropic hiring their ex-coworkers.

Congrats to them both, and I'm not at all surprised! Great acquihires.

xyzzy_plugh 9 hours ago||
There are a tremendous number of Xtripes at both Anthropic and OpenAI.
dgellow 15 hours ago|||
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
rattray 10 hours ago|||
Aww, well this thread is a nice surprise :) thanks for the kind words!
bherms 11 hours ago||
I worked with him at Hired. Great dude!
jviotti 13 hours ago||
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?

blackqueeriroh 7 hours ago|
It’s the fourth tenet of the Cook Doctrine:

“We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”

compounding_it 3 hours ago||
I read stainless and immediately thought ‘stainless steel’. I thought some company developed the method and patented it. Now why would anthropic buy that.

But the truth is that this is actually not entirely impossible. The AI world is going crazier than this.

tehalex 15 hours ago||
OpenAI uses stainless for at least some of their SDKs.
firtoz 15 hours ago||
I guess they'll be able to vibecode a replacement pretty quickly

I hope they make it open source!

postalcoder 15 hours ago|||
from the very beginning. i remember going through their code and seeing stainless all over the comments. great marketing.
nomel 15 hours ago||
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.

djm_ 15 hours ago|||
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.

kristjansson 15 hours ago|||
> Anthropic

GP:

> OpenAI

??

orliesaurus 12 hours ago||
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

Destiner 11 hours ago|
> Did they just want to hire some extra skilled engineers?

This. Probably to work on Anthropic's SDKs and tooling.

firatsarlar 1 hour ago||
Another acquisition. Another growth move. Please don't stop. Grow, run as fast as you can. So what? So you grow. So what? Grow. As you can. Can't some stay small... Just some. All the marketing effort — I'm no pro, just my perception — is a constant pain for me. Things I like, things I get used to, keep leaving the product. The thing that might actually do some good — possibly — sits in a queue, never sees daylight. So. Be a grown-up. An adult.
abr0ahm 15 hours ago|
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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