Anthropic Buys Stainless To Cut Off OpenAI And Google SDK Access

Anthropic just cut off a piece of infrastructure OpenAI and Google were quietly relying on. It did it by acquiring Stainless per TechCrunch.

On Monday, Anthropic announced it had acquired the developer tools startup founded by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray. Terms were not disclosed, though prior reporting suggested a price north of $300 million. Stainless had been backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz and was already embedded across the AI ecosystem.

Read the headline as another model war headline and you will miss what actually happened. This was an infrastructure move. More specifically, an infrastructure denial play.