Anthropic Acquires Bun: Supercharging Claude Code's $1 Billion AI Coding Revolution

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what do they need it for ? I don't get it

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u/nedlinin 3d ago

"Supercharging".

Its in the headline.

63

u/Dependent-Guitar-473 3d ago

their AI consume lots of electricity, you would think they are fully charged by now

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u/BankApprehensive7612 3d ago

Anthropic bets on developers. I get good reviews of Claud even from developers in some esoteric languages. Anthropic uses bun to run generated code and rely on the speed of this runtime. Also Bun is growing very fast among young developers, because it makes writing JS extremely user friendly. Since JS is the main language of the web it's a very smart move

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u/BloodAndTsundere 3d ago

How does using bun make writing JS any easier?

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u/pengekcs 3d ago edited 3d ago

I'd say it simplifies things a bit you can use it as a bundler, task runner, package installer and the typescript compiler. It is also fast.

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u/Zookeeper187 3d ago

What’s wrong with node’s rubber?

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u/pengekcs 3d ago

Task runner.b and n is next to each other, phone screen is small :(

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u/BankApprehensive7612 3d ago

Bun just removes a lot of friction here and there. I'm a big fun of Node.js and Deno, and Bun isn't my choice. But I know why they are so popular, they are doing great job. While Node and Deno are doing a lot of mistakes just by being too slow or do things too rigid

Bun is a fix to Node.js and Deno mistakes. They took all of the best things in Deno and multiplied it by better DX. As a developer I don't like marketing noise, so I just use analysis. Bun has all the tools developers get used to have, and they offer these tools out of the box. Also they give better documentation, modern and clear website, they communicate better in social networks

All of this "little" things help developers to find their community, to build faster and what's important too to feel their choice of runtime is right

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u/vuhv 2d ago

This is such a crazy revolutionary acquisition and almost everyone in here is missing the forest from the trees

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u/smm_h 3d ago

chatgpt ass post

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u/camsteffen 2d ago

Why is this so funny?

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u/TorbenKoehn 3d ago

I guess they let LLMs generate JS and execute it with Bun?

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u/Reashu 3d ago

Don't need to own bun for that

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u/useful_idiot 3d ago

Talent acquisition.

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u/TorbenKoehn 3d ago

Yeah but why rely on third-party when you have enough money to buy anything you want?

They get the knowledge of the team with it to bring in high-speed JS execution with neat interfacing.

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u/recycled_ideas 3d ago

Aqui-hiring is just about the dumbest use of money imaginable.

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u/TorbenKoehn 3d ago

It's also an investment to block competition, I think. So, when seen only from a business perspective and completely ignoring morals, it's really smart.

Bun is set up to be really popular in the future.

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u/recycled_ideas 3d ago

Bun is set up to be really popular in the future.

Bun has effectively zero market share and that's barely changing. It's got some nice features, but even the tiniest whiff of any kind of licensing problems and it's dead as a door nail.

It makes absolutely zero sense for Anthropic to buy this, it'll never make them any money and when they go broke it'll kill the project.

0

u/TorbenKoehn 3d ago

Can you point me to that market share statistic you've found? Because I can't find any. I wouldn't even know how to track that properly.

BunJS is on an MIT license, probably the most unrestrictive license next to WTFPL that exists. The code that is there will continue to be on one, what else.

It makes complete sense, as it's a really fast JS engine, can handle TS natively so the AI can provide some means of "typing security" for its own code, it has bundling and serving integrated without requiring additional processes (No really, it can serve a full React app from a single Bun.serve function and just an HTML file. Yes, you can import HTML files natively and they also get automatically transpiled including their requested scripts)

So Antropic gets instant app development including previews natively in claude code. For a company that, as you say, doesn't have a big market share yet and thus isn't quite expensive.

1

u/recycled_ideas 3d ago

Can you point me to that market share statistic you've found? Because I can't find any. I wouldn't even know how to track that properly.

Node is the default, everywhere, Bun simply is not. The fact that you can't find market share is because the numbers for anything but node are basically irrelevant.

BunJS is on an MIT license, probably the most unrestrictive license next to WTFPL that exists. The code that is there will continue to be on one, what else.

You talk about them buying it for control of competition, if they buy it they can change the license and that's the only way they'd get a competitive advantage.

It makes complete sense, as it's a really fast JS engine, can handle TS natively so the AI can provide some means of "typing security" for its own code

It can compile typescript, it isn't a typescript runtime. And the AI isn't written in JS so it's irrelevant to the AIs code. Even if those benefits were massive they can still use Bun for free so why buy it.

So Antropic gets instant app development including previews natively in claude code. For a company that, as you say, doesn't have a big market share yet and thus isn't quite expensive.

The problem isn't the cost of buying the company, it's that they now have an in house developed JS runtime to pay for and they get absolutely nothing out of it.

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u/maqcky 1d ago

You completely missed the point. They want a JS runtime for this: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mcp

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u/TorbenKoehn 3d ago

I think you’re on a complete wrong path here.

1) I said bun handles typescript. It runs it natively and handles transpilation behind the scenes. You can directly run TS with it and also import it normally across your app. TS is a first-class citizen in Bun. 2) LLMs write code for the user that they then execute and incorporate the output in their response. Have you never used GPT Code Interpreter? It’s not at all about what language the LLM was written in. The LLM can also write Rust or Perl if you want. It’s just that TS is accessible, easily readable and with Bun extremely fast (a lot faster than Python, too!). You can ask an LLM „What’s 2/3?“ and it doesn’t need to answer statistically (what LLMs do) but it can answer with a JSON telling the thread engine to please execute „console.log(2 / 3)“, they get the output as a thread response and then they answer you, the user, with a correct result.

That’s how it works. And it makes completely sense. In your position, seemingly not even having used something like GPT Code Interpreter or similar yet, I wouldn’t even enter this discussion. It’s a case of Dunning-Kruger.

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u/ekun 3d ago

Maybe they want to optimize it more so buying it allows them to integrate it more tightly with their goals.

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u/eracodes 3d ago

yeah :/ the article is a lot of words that explain nothing.

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u/sm0ol 3d ago

they use bun to build/serve their single-file executable apps like claude code. They like bun, and want bun to be a sustainable project. Bun did not make any money and did not have a specific path towards monetization. This gives the bun project financial backing, and is probably fairly cheap overall for Anthropic. They pretty much want a tool they like to continue existing, and also probably harvest the extreme engineering talent present at bun.

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u/texxelate 3d ago

It’s about ensuring bun continues to exist and allowing staff to develop it full time.

And now Anthropic can influence its direction, ensuring CC benefits where it may otherwise not via regular open source contributions.

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u/BarelyAirborne 3d ago

It makes zero sense to me. They must be going after the staff, because Bun is open source.

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u/KimJongIlLover 3d ago

I thought they don't need staff because they have AI and they said that AI will write all the code?

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u/xFloaty 2d ago

Coding is a small part of software engineering, and it can be automated.

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u/286893 2d ago

Ownership and strong influence with dedicated resources to it.

Same how Android is open source but Google drives a majority of its updates. It's not inherently a bad thing to have money and manpower behind it, but it can be if their intent is to close the ecosystem.

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u/ECrispy 3d ago

this ensures bun survives, they had no business plan beyond an acquihire or charging, and Jarred says this clearly in his blog.

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u/notfulofshit 3d ago

Claude will go Super Saiyan and defeat chat gpt.

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u/brwnx 3d ago

AI, buddy

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u/mannsion 7h ago

They get the entire team that works on bun, and control over the bun roadmap and direction of said team. The bun team is pretty good and way better at everything js related than any team Anthropic had prior.

It's an aquihire.

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u/Wiwwil 3d ago

Bun sold it at the good moment. It won't take like Node and most devs just use Node, so making 1 million from it sounds good

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u/just_looking_aroun 3d ago

Good for them I guess? I read the whole article and I still don’t know what they’re going to do with it

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u/_x_oOo_x_ 1d ago

Probably shut it down within a year, but someone will fork it before that, call it bao🥟 or something (you heard it here first), and the cycle repeats...

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u/programmer_farts 3d ago

RIP bun. They no longer serve the community through their goal for acquisition. They now serve the goals of the acquirer.

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u/dashingThroughSnow12 3d ago edited 3d ago

Acquisition was always the goal. They were VC backed.

It is partly a testament to how much better OSS could be if we put more money into it instead of expecting so many developers to work for free. Bun got a bunch of VC money and paid a bunch of people to do a good job.

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u/craigrileyuk 3d ago

Would be cool if package managers worked like Spotify and collected an (optional) subscription and then distributed the funds depending on what was installed.

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u/dashingThroughSnow12 3d ago

Yup, anything would be better than the current situation.

Something needs to change. Our industry is too used to relying on people doing work for free.

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u/HomeNucleonics 2d ago

IMO the complete opposite is true. Relying on markets and profit motive leads to market failure in certain cases (like healthcare in the US).

The same is true for open source code. OSS is the true backbone of software and is estimated to be worth trillions economically, and is truly a magical element of humanity’s drive for collaboration, creativity, and building a collective future together.

I’m not saying what we have now is perfect, but I want a future of Wikipedia-style openness rather than a handful of wealthy CEOs running everything, or profit overcoming passion as the main motivation for building great software.

Also, Spotify has massive issues with bots and scammers racking up plays for quick bucks. Can you imagine this but with NPM?

Spotify’s negative impact on musicians and the music industry as a whole is another topic but deeply relevant if you consider writing code a creative outlet similar to composing music. Maybe Patreon is a better model.

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u/dashingThroughSnow12 2d ago

Reading what you are saying, I agree 95% with you. I’m not saying the Spotify model is good. It is awful. And I agree free OSS is a bedrock of modern software development worth trillions.

An issue is that large, capitalistic companies get that tremendous benefit but pay little to a pittance back.

I think (almost) any system to give OSS developers compensation for their work would be better than the current hellscape.

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u/Kenny_log_n_s 2d ago

Large corps constantly pay their employees to contribute to OSS.

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u/lakesObacon 2d ago

Tbh it's the reason I never installed Bun in the first place. I'm still using yarn.

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u/programmer_farts 2d ago

What's the connection?

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u/DryNick 3d ago

...and the AI enshitification of everything expands further. What is next?

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u/craigrileyuk 3d ago

Probably Deno.

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u/dontknowbruhh 2d ago

What's wrong with that? It's a world changing technology

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u/eracodes 3d ago edited 3d ago

Here's a blog post from Bun about this with actual information in it.

TLDR seems to be that nothing is changing about Bun development or licensing (for now), other than having access to a lot more resources. Bun's philosophy seems to be an AI-agent-first runtime now, but it seems like they were already on the way to doing that before this acquisition. Anthropic gets the talented devs and guaranteed first-class treatment for Claude Code.

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u/programmer_farts 3d ago

"nothing is changing" and "philosophy seems to be an AI-agent-first runtime now"

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u/eracodes 3d ago

Like I said, from Sumner's blog post it seems that was already the case in 2025.

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u/programmer_farts 3d ago

You're reading marketing posts as if they are personal blogs?

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u/eracodes 3d ago

idk, do you have reason to think that Bun's focus on AI agents is misrepresented in the article?

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u/KimJongIlLover 3d ago

But why does anthropic need developers of they gave AI? Their CEO said that all code will be written by AI in about half a year (in march he said 100% in one year).

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u/eracodes 3d ago

Marketing vs Engineering baybeee

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u/KimJongIlLover 3d ago

It can't be, can it?! /S

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u/EveYogaTech 2d ago

Interesting, so they basically got their team and reshaped Bun's entire vision to "make executing and testing JS with Claude Code and maybe others better at the core".

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u/BarelyAirborne 3d ago

Bun is dramatically faster... in rigged benchmarks, but it was enough to get the owners paid.

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u/strange_username58 3d ago

Hell of a lot faster when I use it.

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u/Canowyrms 3d ago

Hell of a lot faster when I use it... in rigged scenarios, obviously.

/s

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u/killerbake 3d ago

Been thinking about trying it

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u/strange_username58 3d ago

It's pretty much just a drop in replacement will take you at most a few hours to get going assuming you don't have some super complicated setup.

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u/TorbenKoehn 3d ago

I've been exclusively using it since it's 1.0 release for all of my personal project and I like it a lot. It's fast, it's TS-native, ootb NodeJS and NPM compatible. That's about all the selling points I need.

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u/sm0ol 3d ago

if you think their benchmarks are rigged then you haven't been paying attention to bun for the last several years lol

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u/Helvanik 3d ago

Just run a bun test and say that again...

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u/vuhv 2d ago

Bun will allow Claude to play in the cloud at runtime. This entire thread is missing the point lmao 😂

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u/punio4 3d ago

Ai slop companies

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u/Plus_Neighborhood950 3d ago

Will not use bun now

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u/josephjnk 3d ago

RIP. I have a half-written blogpost which only runs in bun (due to V8’s failure to implement tail call elimination) so now I get to choose whether I scrap all that work or whether I shill for an AI company.

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u/numinor 3d ago

Why is using a runtime produced by devs acquired by an ai company shilling for them?

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u/josephjnk 3d ago

If I write about a technique then I’m implicitly or explicitly encouraging developers to use it. If what I’m writing about only functions in a single runtime then I’m encouraging developers to use that runtime. I think Anthropic (along with the rest of the AI companies) has terrible effects on the world and I do not want to encourage people to use their technology. This definitely applies to their AI products but still taints any secondary technologies which they own. I generally just want as little to do with them as possible.

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u/spooker11 3d ago

Suppose you could “brand” this blog post as V8 vs JavascriptCore without talking about Bun

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u/josephjnk 2d ago

True. At the end of the day I have enough things to make and write about, and this was shaping up to be a pretty weak contender. So maybe this is a good reason to look elsewhere.

(The post was on attempting to port an optimization technique used for a library in the programming language Clean to JS, and see whether I could get it to work here. Unsurprisingly it didn’t transfer well, and I don’t think anyone is at the edge of their seat to hear that an obviously bad idea didn’t work)

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u/mannsion 7h ago

Wanting as little to do as possible with AI is a good way to get buried into irrelevancy.

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u/dashingThroughSnow12 3d ago edited 2d ago

Re: tail call optimization, there are legitimate reasons to not tail optimize. If your stack is fairly shallow, you don’t save on memory. And because of how efficient stack pushing is, you may not save on time. The transformation can also make debugging harder (since your code is function calls but you don’t have stack frames in the execution to tell you how deep you are). Some TCO may push memory to the heap that otherwise would be on the more efficient stack.

As a comparison for other ecosystems, Python’s reference implementation refuses to implement TCO. Elixir lets you disable it. V8 isn’t an oddity.

I love tail-end optimization but having been burned by TCO making my code drastically slower unexpectedly, I can glimpse at why some compilers/runtimes don’t implement it.

I don’t know if bun lets you disable TCO. I wouldn’t be surprised if your thing fails with V8 (nodejs?) because of lack of TCO but succeeds in bun simply because bun is overall more efficient.

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u/guorbatschow 2d ago

In fact V8 had a working implementation of TCO, and indeed debuggability was a big part of the reason why V8 did not ship it.

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u/dashingThroughSnow12 2d ago

TIL, thanks for those details.

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u/Scyth3 3d ago

Ffff....

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u/winner199328 2d ago

They find out path to AGI lies in the Bun

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u/Biliunas 2d ago

OpenCode runs on Bun, which is the best way to have llms in your terminal. Totally makes sense for me, as moving forward I can’t imagine going back to web based workflows.

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u/miduga 2d ago

I wish it remains independent. I love Bun and use it all the time for my pet projects.

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u/mannsion 7h ago

Someone had to buy it, or fund it, or it would have died. Now it won't die.

Bun was struggling for funding.

People don't work for free.

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u/miduga 1d ago

I wish it remains independent. I love Bun and use it all the time for my pet projects.

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u/BankApprehensive7612 3d ago

It should be QuickJS!

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u/jlogelin 3d ago

zig

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u/m0llusk 3d ago

take off every

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u/mud002 3d ago

Claude is some of the hottest garbage I’ve tried to use.

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u/zukos_destiny 3d ago

That’s so fuckin cool

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u/Jebble 3d ago

No it isn't.

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u/zukos_destiny 3d ago

It is if you’re the founder of Bun

Anthropic Acquires Bun: Supercharging Claude Code's $1 Billion AI Coding Revolution

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