Anthropic announced Monday that it has acquired Stainless, a startup founded by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray whose software is widely used by rival artificial intelligence labs, including OpenAI and Google.
Anthropic did not disclose terms of the deal. However, the information reported Last week, Anthropic was in talks to acquire Stainless, backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, for more than $300 million.
The acquisition will take a key infrastructure provider out of the hands of Anthropic’s competitors. The company told TechCrunch it will close all stainless products housedincluding its SDK generator. An Anthropic spokesperson said Stainless customers will remain owners of the SDKs they have generated to date and will have full rights to modify and extend them as they wish.
The New York-based startup, founded in 2022, rose to prominence in the emerging artificial intelligence 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 which could take API specifications and turn them into production-ready SDKs in multiple programming languages, including Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, Go, and Java. It became a popular tool because the platform automatically updated SDKs as APIs changed and eliminated the time-consuming process of manually maintaining them.
The technology is particularly valuable for companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Replicate, Runway and Cloudflare that are creating AI agents that can connect to external software and complete tasks on behalf of users. Stainless’s SDK tools are an easy way to build and maintain those connections, but in the future, the tools will only be available to Anthropic, not its competitors.
According to Anthropic, Stainless software has driven the generation of all official Anthropic SDKs since the early days of its API.
“I started with Stainless because the SDKs deserve as much attention as the APIs they wrap,” Rattray said. in a press release published 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 bringing our teams together an easy decision. The team can continue doing the work we love, on the platform where it matters most.”
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