Altering the Deal
The AI industry is shifting from research to industrial performance, and repricing relationships across the ecosystem in the process.
Anthropic acquired Stainless on May 18 and announced that it would shut down the startup’s hosted products, including the SDK generator that OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare had all relied on. That same week, details emerged of Meta’s months-long effort to record employees’ computer activity for AI training data, followed by a round of layoffs that eliminated roughly 10 percent of the company’s workforce. Both companies discovered that a relationship they already had, one with a vendor and the other with its own employees, contained something more valuable than the original transaction.
SDKs on lockdown
Stainless, founded in 2022 by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray, built software that turned API specifications into production-ready SDKs across Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, and Kotlin. Hundreds of companies relied on its tools, but the client list that mattered most included OpenAI, Google, Cloudflare, Runway, and Anthropic, each of which depended on Stainless to generate and maintain the libraries through which developers connect to their APIs. Stainless had powered every official Anthropic SDK since the earliest days of the Claude API and had recently expanded into MCP server tooling. Anthropic had created MCP as an open protocol for connecting AI agents to external systems, and Stainless had built some of its most widely adopted connectors. The acquisition placed both the protocol and its primary tooling vendor under single ownership.
Anthropic paid more than $300 million for the company, roughly double its December 2024 valuation, and confirmed that it would wind down all hosted Stainless products. Existing customers retain the SDKs they have already generated and can modify them freely. The automated pipeline that maintained and updated those libraries now belongs exclusively to Anthropic. Every former client must rebuild or replace that infrastructure in-house, absorbing an engineering cost that Stainless had carried for the entire industry.
The deal is Anthropic’s fourth acquisition in six months, following the JavaScript runtime Bun in December, computer-use startup Vercept in February, and biotech AI company Coefficient Bio in April. The first three added internal capability to Anthropic. The Stainless acquisition removed shared infrastructure from Anthropic’s direct competitors, and industry analysts noted that distinction within hours of the announcement.
Training on the job
Meta’s Model Capability Initiative, disclosed in an internal memo in April, captures keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and periodic screenshots from employees’ work computers across hundreds of websites and applications, including Google, LinkedIn, GitHub, and Slack. U.S.-based employees cannot opt out of the tracking. European employees are exempt under GDPR. CTO Andrew Bosworth described the initiative’s purpose in a separate memo reported by Reuters: a future in which AI agents “primarily do the work” and employees’ role is to “direct, review and help them improve.” A leaked recording from a company all-hands captured Zuckerberg defending the program, arguing that Meta’s AI models needed to learn from employees whose work he described as high-caliber. The recordings capture how engineers navigate complex software workflows, a form of behavioral data that no public internet scrape can replicate.
On May 20, Meta laid off approximately 8,000 employees, roughly 10 percent of its global workforce, with notifications beginning at 4 AM Singapore time and rolling westward through Europe and the Americas. The company simultaneously eliminated 6,000 open positions and reassigned another 7,000 employees into AI-focused divisions. These cuts arrived during Meta’s most profitable quarter on record: $26.8 billion in net income on $56.3 billion in revenue for Q1 2026, a 33 percent increase from the year before.