An acquisition that closes a door
On 18 May 2026, Anthropic announced the acquisition of Stainless, a New York-based startup founded in 2022 by Alex Rattray, a former Stripe engineer. Its specialty: automatically generating, from the description of a programming interface, the development kits (SDKs) that allow developers to use an API in TypeScript, Python, Go, Java or Kotlin. Stainless generated all of Anthropic's official SDKs, but also tools used by OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare, reports TechCrunch.
The amount was not disclosed; The Information mentioned before the announcement discussions at over 300 million dollars. The decisive point lies elsewhere: Stainless announced the shutdown of all its hosted products, including its SDK generator, for all its customers. They retain the SDKs already produced, but lose the tool that updated them with each evolution of their API. Several had to react: according to The New Stack, Cloudflare published its own open source generator, Forge, in September.
The logic of the AI that acts
Why buy a development tool? Because the industry is shifting from models that respond to agents that act, and an agent is only as good as what it can connect to. Katelyn Lesse, head of platform engineering at Anthropic, explains in the press release:
“Agents are only as useful as what they can connect to. We are thrilled to welcome the Stainless team to Anthropic to advance Claude's ability to connect to data and tools.” (Katelyn Lesse, Anthropic, translated from English)
Alex Rattray recalls on his side having created Stainless “because SDKs deserve as much care as the APIs they wrap.” Stainless adds to a series of recent acquisitions by Anthropic: the JavaScript tool Bun in December 2025, then Vercept and Coefficient Bio in early 2026.
Google and the race for the personal agent
The next day, 19 May, Google opened its I/O conference. The company launched Gemini 3.5 Flash, which became the default model of the Gemini app and the AI mode of search, which Sundar Pichai presents as “four times faster than other leading models” in tokens produced per second. The Pro version was announced for the following month.
The star was however Gemini Spark, a personal agent that runs continuously on Google Cloud virtual machines and that Google describes as an agent that “acts on your behalf and under your direction.” It was first reserved for testers, then offered in beta to US subscribers of Google AI Ultra. Google created on this occasion an Ultra tier at 100 dollars per month and lowered the top tier from 250 to 200 dollars, according to Reuters. The company also presented Universal Cart, a smart shopping cart common to search and Gemini, then to YouTube and Gmail.
Revealing detail: Spark must connect to third-party tools via MCP, the connection protocol launched by Anthropic. Rivals clash on products, but converge on certain standards.
Europe served on delay
At the time of I/O, several of these features were not available in France. Universal Cart must first be deployed in the US this summer, then in Canada, Australia and the UK; no date has been announced for France, notes Numerama. The AI mode of search, long blocked in France amid negotiations on neighboring rights of the press, finally arrived there on 22 July 2026, according to Google.
This delay is not just an inconvenience for the user. It shows that Europeans' access to the most advanced tools depends on decisions made elsewhere, at the pace of commercial strategies and litigation. One can see it as proof that European law carries weight, or as a sign of a Europe relegated to the status of a secondary market.
The wall of capital
These announcements rely on extraordinary resources. According to Futurum Group, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle planned to spend together 660 to 690 billion dollars in investments in 2026, almost double that of 2025. Anthropic indicated in April that its annualized revenue exceeded 30 billion dollars, compared to 9 billion at the end of 2025, with more than 1 000 customers each spending more than one million dollars per year.
This acceleration has a social cost. On 20 May, Meta laid off approximately 8 000 people, or 10 % of its workforce, and renounced filling 6 000 positions, while planning 125 to 145 billion dollars in investments in 2026, according to Reuters. Tech giants now assume they will finance their AI infrastructure in part through staff reductions.
The protocol as a battlefield
The connection layer has become strategic. MCP, made public by Anthropic in November 2024, is today the de facto standard for connecting agents to tools: its main SDKs approach, according to the protocol's official blog, half a billion downloads per month. Important nuance, Anthropic no longer has exclusive control: it entrusted MCP in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation. Lock-in therefore does not go through the protocol, which remains open, but through the proprietary tools built around it, like those of Stainless.
What European response?
Europe does not lack levers. It can defend truly open standards and neutral governance of protocols, like that of MCP. It can steer its public procurement towards components it can audit and host, like Mistral's open-weight models. Finally, it can use competition law when an actor buys a shared infrastructure to remove it from its rivals.
The Stainless episode recalls a simple lesson: in agentic AI, dependence is not only about models, but about a multitude of discrete components, from SDK generators to protocols and agents. Controlling them, or at least ensuring they remain open, is now a matter of industrial policy.
Sources: Anthropic, “Anthropic acquires Stainless”, 18 May 2026 ; Stainless, “Stainless is joining Anthropic”, 18 May 2026 ; TechCrunch, “Anthropic has acquired the dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare”, 18 May 2026 ; The New Stack, “Anthropic bought Stainless and shuttered its SDK generator. Cloudflare open-sourced Forge instead.”, 28 September 2026 ; Google, “100 things we announced at Google I/O 2026”, 20 May 2026 ; Google, Google AI subscriptions after I/O 2026, 19 May 2026 ; Reuters, “Google courts coders and consumers at I/O…”, 19 May 2026 ; CRN, Sundar Pichai keynote, 20 May 2026 ; Numerama, Universal Cart, 19 May 2026 ; Google France, launch of AI Overviews and AI Mode in France, 22 July 2026 ; Futurum Group, “AI Capex 2026: The $690B Infrastructure Sprint” ; Bloomberg, “Anthropic Tops $30 Billion Run Rate”, 6 April 2026 ; Reuters, layoffs at Meta, 20 May 2026 ; Reuters, Meta investment forecasts, 29 April 2026 ; Model Context Protocol blog ; Linux Foundation, creation of the Agentic AI Foundation, 9 December 2025 ; Benzinga, Anthropic acquisition of Coefficient Bio, April 2026.
