Anthropic acquires Bun

1983 points - yesterday at 6:05 PM

Source

Comments

dts yesterday at 8:52 PM
A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating a runtime where your agent can work inside of cloud services as fluently as it currently does with a local filesystem. Claude will be able to leverage these capabilities to extend its reach across the cloud and add more value in enterprise use cases
danirogerc today at 2:47 PM
Hopefully it doesn't push other LLM companies to go the same route.
mritchie712 yesterday at 6:33 PM
> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.

I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.

> Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetization" – thanks to Anthropic, we can skip that chapter entirely and focus on building the best JavaScript tooling.

I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.

notnullorvoid today at 2:58 AM
I am more shocked about the origin story compared to the acquisition.

> Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload.

Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always seemed pretty smart, but this makes no sense. He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.

elAhmo today at 10:23 AM
> Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.

Huh, this feels very odd to read and buying a company outright is definitely not the only way to push Bun to be excellent. Contributing to Bun from their developers, becoming a sponsor, donating through other means, buying 'consulting services' or similar, or even forking it and keeping it up to date would all be also steps towards keeping the Bun excellent.

This is vendoring a dependency on steroids, and first moment interests of community are not aligned with what Antropic needs, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. History has thought us that this will end up with claims in the blog post not holding much weight.

Jarred yesterday at 8:28 PM
I work on Bun.

Happy to answer any questions

hinkley yesterday at 8:24 PM
I wonder if this is a sign of AI companies trying to pivot?

> Bun will ship faster.

That'll last until FY 2027. This is an old lie that acquirers encourage the old owner to say because they have no power to enforce it, and they didn't actually say it so they're not on the hook. It's practically a cheesy pickup line, and given the context, it kinda is.

someguyiguess today at 2:24 PM
This explains why Claude started transpiling & running JavaScript code! Yesterday, when I asked it to generate a document for me in JavaScript, it generated the JavaScript and then ran it to generate a document. I had never actually seen it compile and run any code before. It only would ever output code and either use the shell (Claude code) to run it on my local computer or allow me to copy and paste it.
soapdog today at 1:30 PM
oh, I really dislike that. I don't want AI companies encroaching more in my development workflow. Used to really enjoy Bun, but don't want support Anthropic at all. Will switch back to another runtime.
bababuu today at 7:47 AM
I find it a little sad, that there is almost no pushback on what a few people with deep pockets are trying to sell here. Normaly on HN an article on balcon gardening would be met with more critical thinking than this piece. Maybe instead of staring to the screen all day long take a break, think about what people with lots of money care about. And I don't judge, making money is nothing illegal. But Anthropic would be absolutely NOTHING without OSS. And then to see the kind of this effusive, submissive admiration and gratitude for their js wrapper thing makes me sick to my stomach.
simgt today at 2:03 PM
We're meant to all be 100x more productive with Claude Code but

- Anthropic can't write its TUI app in anything else more suitable than Javascript

- They feel the need to buy a portion of their software supply chain

andrewl-hn yesterday at 6:28 PM
I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so.

Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it.

Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will support them well.

pier25 yesterday at 8:58 PM
I wonder what this means for Deno.

Will this make it more or less likely for people to use Bun vs Deno?

And now that Bun doesn't need to run a profitable cloud company will they move faster and get ahead of Deno?

mcdow today at 12:05 AM
From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised.

How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm.

What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing?

Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?

fishmicrowaver yesterday at 6:47 PM
My first thought went to how openai used Rust to build their CLI tool and Anthropic's CEO bought influence over Zig as a reaction.
Tiberium yesterday at 6:26 PM
As someone who have been using Deno for the last few years, is there anything that Bun does better? Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?). The last time I checked Bun's source code, it was... quite messy and spaghetti-like, plus Zig doesn't really offer many safety features, so it's not that hard to write incorrect code. Zig does force some safety with ReleaseSafe IIRC, but it's still not the same as even modern C++, let alone Rust.

I'll admit I'm somewhat biased against Bun, but I'm honestly interested in knowing why people prefer Bun over Deno.

qjack yesterday at 10:22 PM
Anthropic has been trying to win the developer marketshare, and has been quite successful with Claude Code. While I understand the argument that this acquisition is to protect their usage in CC or even just to acquire the team, I do hope that part of their goal is to use this to strengthen their brand. Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company.
aperture147 today at 10:15 AM
Why don't they use their self-acclaimed SE-replacing AI coding bot to fork Bun and called it AnthroBun instead of hiring actual engineers behind Bun?
mhitza yesterday at 6:36 PM
This acquisition makes no sense.

Investors must be happy because Bun never had to find out how to become profitable.

TekMol yesterday at 7:13 PM
What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that?

In the article they write about the early days

    We raised a $7 million seed round
Why do investors invest into people who build something that they give away for free?
socketcluster today at 5:21 AM
Bun is pretty cool. I maintain a Node.js library and updated my Node.js engine version and my library just didn't work on the latest version... In frustration, I decided to try Bun for the first time... I had never used it before but my library worked straight away, no warnings, no errors. I have never seen that level of compatibility before when a library works better with an alternative engine than the one it was designed for.

I did end up fixing Node.js compatibility later but it was extra work. Felt like they just created busy-work. Node.js maintainers should stop deprecating perfectly good features and complicating their modules.

phplovesong today at 1:57 PM
RIP Bun. I guess a bet on deno was the right bet.
elktown yesterday at 8:29 PM
I've seen a few of these seemingly random acquisitions lately, and I congratulate the companies and individuals that are acquired during this gold rush, but it definitely feels awkwardly artificial.
mokarma yesterday at 6:49 PM
Quote from the CEO of Anthropic in March 2025: "I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"
dzonga yesterday at 6:45 PM
it boils down to - we didn't have full conviction that over the long run we will prove superior to node.js, however a.i company burning a lot of cash, has invested in us by basing their toolchain on us - so they have no option to acquire-hire us.
jjordan yesterday at 6:24 PM
I don't really see how Bun fits as an acquisition for an AI company. This seems more like "we have tons of capital and we want to buy something great" than "Bun is essential to our core business model".
bluelightning2k today at 9:43 AM
Since when is a CLI tool like this a sufficiently demanding technical project that it needs to buy the runtime just to get sufficient support?

This just isn't the hard part of the product.

Like if I was building a Claude Code competitor and I acquired bun, I wouldn't feel like I had an advantage because I could get more support with like fs.read?

kace91 yesterday at 6:31 PM
>If most new code is going to be written, tested, and deployed by AI agents

That perspective following “in two-three years” makes me shudder, honestly.

stack_framer yesterday at 8:31 PM
Anyone know how much Anthropic paid for Bun? I assume it was at least $26M, so Bun could break even and pay back its own investors, but I didn't see a number in the announcements from Anthropic or Bun.
victorbuilds yesterday at 6:18 PM
I use Claude Code CLI daily - it's genuinely changed how I work. The $1B number sounds crazy but honestly tracks with how good the tool is. Curious how Bun integration will show up in practice beyond the native installer.
iyn yesterday at 6:25 PM
Curious about the deal value/price — any clues whether it was just to make existing investors even (so say up to $30M) or are we talking some multiple? But if it's a multiple, even 2x sounds a bit crazy.
asim yesterday at 6:30 PM
It's more honest than the Replicate answer but I think inevitably if you can't raise the next round and you get distracted by the shiny AI that this is the path taken by many teams. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was an exuberant time when all the OSS things were getting funded, and now all AI things get funded. For many engineer founders, it's a better fit to go build deep technical stuff inside a bigger company. If I had that chance I would probably have taken it too. Good luck to the Bun team!
bluelightning2k today at 9:45 AM
I think this acquisition in reality has more to do with developer goodwill? And a little to do with the shell game of making these AI companies hard to value because they collect assets like this.
dgellow today at 11:40 AM
Congrats to the Bun team, what a wild ride! Is that the first major zig acquisition?
piskov yesterday at 9:54 PM
Genuine question: why js?

Why not something like c#: native, fast, crossplatform, strongly-typed, great tooling, supports both scripting (ie single file-based) and compiled to a binary with no dependency whatsoever (nativeAOT), great errors and error stacks, list goes on.

All great for AI to recover during its iterations of generating something useful.

Genuinely perplexed.

VerifiedReports today at 4:40 AM
"Node.js compatibility & replacing Node.js as the default server-side runtime for JavaScript"

Except Node's author already wrote its replacement: Deno.

odyssey7 today at 10:56 AM
Proper tail calls for the win! Hopefully Google, now in its AI race, decides to give V8 its due.
bovermyer yesterday at 8:36 PM
When I saw the headline I was ready to be mad, but after reading the post, I'm cautiously on board with this.
blixt yesterday at 11:53 PM
Extrapolating and wildly guessing, we could end up with using all that mostly idle CPU/RAM (the non-VRAM) on the beefy GPUs doing inference on agentic loops where the AI runs small JS scripts in a sandbox (which Bun is the best at, with its faster startup times and lower RAM use, not to mention its extensive native bindings that Node.js/V8 do not have) essentially allowing multiple turns to happen before yielding to the API caller. It would also go well with Anthropic's advanced tool use that they recently announced. This would be a big competitive advantage in the age of agents.
pech0rin today at 6:17 AM
Look Bun is a great product but something hilarious about the company that is “going to replace all software developers with AI” BUYING software. You are building a product that is supposed to make software cost 0 right? Why wouldn’t you just “vibe” code yourself Bun?
_andrei_ today at 12:34 AM
All vendors will have to implement test time code execution, solution exploration, etc. as it's a low hanging fruit with huge gains, so I see it as a great hire. Love Bun, happy for you guys!
ymsodev yesterday at 6:25 PM
This somewhat answers the question of "how on earth is a JS runtime company going to profit?"
devops000 yesterday at 10:59 PM
Shopify should buy Ruby on Rails because they depends on it
ctoth yesterday at 6:29 PM
This decision is honestly very confusing to me as a constant user of Claude Code (I have 3 of them open at the moment.)

So many of the issues with it seem to be because ... they wrote the damn thing in JavaScript?

Claude is pretty good at a constrained task with tests -- couldn't you just port it to a different language? With Claude?

And then just ... the huge claude.json which gets written on every message, like ... SQLite exists! Please, please use it! The scrollback! The Keyboard handling! Just write a simple Rust or Go or whatever CLI app with an actual database and reasonable TUI toolkit? Why double down and buy a whole JavaScript runtime?

a-dub yesterday at 6:35 PM
they acquihired the team and derisked their investment in building claude code on top of bun. makes sense to me.

moreover, now they can make investments in order to make it an an even more efficient and secure runtime for model workspaces.

mkornaukhov today at 7:43 AM
That's good news. I hope this will encourage the industry to use the Zig language (and its creators to release version 1.0).
deleted yesterday at 6:23 PM
tkel yesterday at 6:23 PM
Oh no ... unfortunately this likely means a Bun.AI API in my JS runtime.
everlier yesterday at 7:17 PM
So many comments about reasoning here, yet none about the very obvious one, it's not stability of the infrastructure, it's future direction of a product like Claude Code. They need to know how to continue their optimisation machine to fit developers needs the best way possible (for good or for worse).

I guess we should wait for some opt-out telemetry some time soon. It'll be nothing too crazy at first, but we'll see how hungry they are for the data.

yanis_t yesterday at 6:25 PM
I don't get it. Why would Anthropic need to own a JS runtime?
shrubble yesterday at 9:58 PM
There's no reason to run agents on expensive AI platforms or on GPUs - when you can have the AI create an agent in JS and thus runs with very high performance and perfect repeatability on far less expensive CPUs.

At the very least there must be some part of the agent tasks that can be run in JS, such as REST APIs, fetching web results, parsing CSV into a table, etc.

ngrilly yesterday at 9:23 PM
Considering that 1) Bun is written in Zig, 2) Zig has a strict no-AI policy [1], and 3) Bun has joined Claude, it seems that Bun and Zig are increasingly culturally apart.

[1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-pol...

indigodaddy yesterday at 9:45 PM
Has CC always used Bun? When it tries it out many months ago it was an npm install not bun install in their instructions (although I did use bun install myself). Just odd that if they were using bun, why the installation wasn’t specifically a “bun install” (I suppose they were trying to keep it vanilla for the npm masses?)
wiseowise yesterday at 6:24 PM
Hope nobody buys Astral or Python is f*cked.
theflyinghorse yesterday at 6:16 PM
Congratulations to the bun team!
javierhonduco yesterday at 11:41 PM
Wondering to what degree this was done to support Anthropic’s web crawler. Would assume that having a whole JS runtime rather than just a HTTP client could be rather useful. Just hypothesising here, no clue what they use for their crawler.
afavour yesterday at 6:23 PM
What matters: it's staying open source and MIT licensed. I sincerely hope it stays that way. Congrats to the Bun team on making a great tool and getting the recognition they deserve.

> Being part of Anthropic gives Bun: Long-term stability.

Let's see. I don't want to always be the downer but the AI industry is in a state of rapid flux with some very strong economic headwinds. I wouldn't confidently say that hitching your wagon to AI gives you long term stability. But as long as the rest of us keep the ability to fork an open source project I won't complain too much.

(for those who are disappointed: this is why you stick with Node. Deno and Bun are both VC funded projects, there's only one way that goes. The only question is timeline)

gethly yesterday at 8:22 PM
> I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig

How was Go involved there before Zig?

s-mon yesterday at 10:10 PM
Congratulations to the team. Knowing some of the folks on the Bun team I can not say I am surprised. They are the top 0,001% of engineers, writing code out of love. I’m hugely bullish on Anthropic, this is a great first acquisition.
Computer0 today at 12:35 AM
So, what if Claude Code starts using Bun in all applicable situations? If model providers train their models to use a tech stack beneficial to their business interests?
bblaylock yesterday at 8:45 PM
This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred personally and likely a loss for bun.
zecheng yesterday at 8:13 PM
So Anthropic sees its CLI (in TypeScript) as the first-class product and maybe planning to expand the claude code with more JS based agents / ecosystem? Especially owning the runtime gives a lot of control over developer experience.
kristianp yesterday at 8:29 PM
I'm confused. I installed claude code with:

    npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
I thought claude code just used Nodejs? I didn't realise the recommended install used a different runtime.
mdtrooper today at 5:48 AM
It is remembers to me to Arduino buy for Qualcomm. And it was not good news.
wavemode today at 2:51 AM
To be honest, I never thought of Bun as something that someone would buy or invest in. What product do they sell?
pelagicAustral yesterday at 6:24 PM
Godspeed. Seems like a good pairing. Bun is sort of the only part of the JS ecosystem I like, and Code has become such an important tool for my work, that I think good things will come out of this match. Go Bundler as well.
ChrisbyMe yesterday at 7:12 PM
Interesting that this announcement is tied in with one for Claude Code revenue.

Feels like maybe AI companies are starting to feel the questions on their capital spending? They wanna show that this is a responsible acquisition.

Anonyneko yesterday at 8:58 PM
I'm only surprised that it wasn't Vercel who bought them.
bilekas yesterday at 9:50 PM
Genuine question, why acquisition when anthropic could simply sponsor, contribute and influence instead?

Acquisition seems like a large overhead and maybe a slight pivot to me.

huqedato yesterday at 9:10 PM
Aham, tx. Good to know - I'll switch my projects to Deno.
jaredcwhite yesterday at 7:58 PM
My long-term bet on Node being "boring" and "stable" continues to pay major dividends. So glad I never invested any time and effort on this ecosystem…
rcarmo yesterday at 9:56 PM
Neat. I just started using bun as my default "batteries included" JavaScript engine, so it's nice they're getting this boost.
heinekan yesterday at 6:25 PM
I’m curious to what the acquisition price was. Bun said they’ve raised $26 million so I’m assuming the price tag has to be a lot higher than that for investors to agree to an acquisition.
NiloCK yesterday at 6:57 PM
This morning I found myself muttering something I won't repeat as a reaction to Claude Code's remarkably slow startup time.

Put the Bun folks directly on that please and nothing else.

polskibus yesterday at 6:40 PM
Wouldn’t it make more sense to write the same functionality using a more performant, no-gc language? Aren’t competitors praised for their CLIs being faster for that reason?
kylecarbs yesterday at 6:26 PM
Bun has completely changed my outlook on the JS ecosystem. Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. Now the entire space rallies around it.

Congrats to Jarred and the team!

kgc today at 4:37 AM
Should we be porting our Python projects over to Javascript?
ximeng yesterday at 6:43 PM
I use bun in a project but Claude Code always uses node to run throwaway scripts. Maybe they can persuade it to use bun as part of this acquisition?
CuriouslyC yesterday at 8:25 PM
I'm sure the Bun team will get Claude Code straightened out. Weird acquisition, but TBH Anthropic needed to fill this hole.
hprotagonist yesterday at 7:11 PM
So, we can anticipate that the new Anthropic browser will now have the interpreter Ken Thompson previewed for us 41-odd years ago?
jedahan yesterday at 6:21 PM
:(
kunley today at 10:38 AM
So will Bun devs now be obliged to stop coding and only manage ai-driven code, like Anthropic devs say they are?

Or perhaps they have in their agreement that Anthropic's own rules don't apply to them?

Serious question, in all this madness

ChrisGreenHeur yesterday at 8:31 PM
A single bun? Is that really newsworthy?
klysm yesterday at 6:52 PM
This wasn’t very high up on my list for acquisitions but props to the bun team for cashing in on the AI hype somehow!
kelvinjps10 yesterday at 7:59 PM
on the post they try to reassure the following question "If I bet my work project or company's tech stack on Bun, will it still be around in five or ten years?" and the thing is that we don't know if Anthropic itself will be around 5 to ten years
smileson2 yesterday at 6:25 PM
Makes sense, I had idea how else the investors would have made money on a javascript bundler/jsc frontend
giancarlostoro yesterday at 6:48 PM
Sounds like the goal is to bundle up Bun with Claude Code insanely tightly, to the point where it doesn't matter if you have nodejs installed locally, but also they can optimize key things for Claude Code's Bun runtime as needed. It's a brilliant acquisition, and bun stays open source, which allows it to continue to grow, to Anthropics benefit and everyone else's.
focusgroup0 yesterday at 6:39 PM
Congratulations to Jared. He and the team are Real Ziggers. Looking forward to a faster Claude Code!
hungryhobbit today at 2:18 AM
But will they fix command line autocompletions?
sherbondy yesterday at 6:47 PM
Congrats Jarred and team! You have saved humanity many hours already, and I'm sure with Anthropic's backing, you will spare us many more. Farewell would-be headaches from Node & NPM tooling and waiting for builds and tests and package updates. Exciting times ahead!

Using bun on a side project reinvigorated my love of software development during a relatively dark time in my life, and part of me wonders if I would have taken the leap onto my current path if it weren't for the joy and feeling of speed that came from working with bun!

joewhale yesterday at 7:57 PM
why couldn't Anthropic simply use Claude Code to write Bun over the weekend??
hedayet yesterday at 6:50 PM
No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"
djfobbz yesterday at 9:50 PM
I finally hope Bun will start to support and work on WSL1
tolerance yesterday at 6:55 PM
Who is expects Anthropic to migrate all their code to Codeberg.
grim_io yesterday at 10:26 PM
Maybe they just like to work together *shrug*.
greatNespresso yesterday at 9:55 PM
Looks like a good time to try learning Zig again
lionkor today at 12:24 PM
> Bun will ship faster.

What? Oh, lots of slop code?

tolerance yesterday at 6:50 PM
Shouts out to the fellow who half-broke the news in this submission that was presumably killed because of the aggressive paywall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123627

And apparently the submission's source for being the only org I can tell that anticipated this: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-advanced-t...

krig yesterday at 7:03 PM
This announcement made me check in on the arbitrary code execution bug I reported that the Bun Claude bot created a PR for about 3 weeks ago:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578

So far, someone from the bun team has left a bunch of comments like

> Poor quality code

...and all the tests still seem to be failing. I looked through the code that the bot had generated and to me (who to be fair is not familiar with the bun codebase) it looks like total dogshit.

But hey, maybe it'll get there eventually. I don't envy "taylordotfish" and the other bot-herders working at Oven though, and I hope they get a nice payout as part of this sale.

reactordev yesterday at 7:17 PM
Bun is such a great runtime. If you haven't tried it, try it. It's got bells and whistles.

This will make sure Bun is around for many, many, years to come. Thanks Anthropic.

Why Bun?

Easy to setup and go. bun run <something.ts>

Bells and whistles. (SQL, Router, SPA, JSX, Bundling, Binaries, Streams, Sockets, S3)

Typescript Supported. (No need to tsc, bun can transpile for you)

Binary builds. (single executables for easy deployment)

Full Node.js Support. (The whole API)

Full NPM Support. (All the packages)

Native modules. (90% and getting better thanks to Zig's interop)

S3 File / SQL Builtin. (Blazingly Fast!)

You should try it. Yes, others do these things too, but we're talking about Bun.

ptak yesterday at 6:36 PM
What a trip. Love both, so all good I guess.
hit8run today at 7:16 AM
I love bun but for a cli tool: why they don’t write Claude Code in Go and call it a day?
dboon yesterday at 6:46 PM
Incredible news on so, so many levels!

(1) Bun is what technical startups should be. Consistently excellent decisions, hyper focused on user experience, and a truly excellent technical product.

(2) We live in a world where TUIs are causing billion dollar acquisitions. Think about that. Obviously, Bun itself is largely orthogonal to the TUIs. Just another use case. But also obviously, they wouldn't have been acquired like this without this use case.

(3) There's been questions of whether startups like Bun can exist. How will they make money? When will they have to sell out one of the three principles in (1) to do so? The answer seems to be that they don't; at least, not like we expected, and in my opinion not in a sinister way.

A sinister or corrupting sell out would be e.g. like Conan. What started as an excellent tool became a bloated, versioned mess as they were forced to implement features to support the corporate customers that sustained them.

This feels different. Of course, there will be some selling out. But largely the interests of Anthropic seem aligned with "build the best JS runtime", since Anthropic themselves must be laser focused on user experience with Claude Code. And just look at Opencode [^1] if you want to see what leaning all the way into Bun gets you. Single file binary distribution, absurdly fast, gorgeous. Their backend, OpenTUI [^2], is a large part of this, and was built in close correspondence with the Bun folks. It's not something that could exist without Bun, in my opinion.

(4) Anthropic could have certainly let Bun be a third party to which they contributed. They did not have to purchase them. But they did. There is a strange not-quite altruism in this; at worst, a casting off of the exploitation of open source we often see from the biggest companies. Things change; what seems almost altruistic now could be revealed to be sinister, or could morph into such. But for now, at least, it feels good and right.

[^1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode [^2]: https://github.com/sst/opentui

egorfine yesterday at 7:19 PM
Well, Bun is MIT-licensed. So once they change the license and/or kill the project, the community can fork it easily.
_pdp_ yesterday at 6:56 PM
It makes total sense to me.
renewiltord yesterday at 6:27 PM
Hahaha congratulations. This is amazing. The most unlikely outcome for a devtools team. Fascinating stuff.

This is promising for Astral et al who I really like but worried about their sustainability. It does point to being as close to the user as possible mattering.

jackblemming yesterday at 6:22 PM
The Bun team works hard, glad to see it pay off.
colesantiago yesterday at 6:16 PM
Is Claude Code the first CLI tool to have a $1BN ARR?
ChrisArchitect yesterday at 6:15 PM
slig yesterday at 6:20 PM
Love bun! Congratulations!
egl2020 yesterday at 7:23 PM
Can anyone provide some color around this: "I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig"? Hypothetical benefits include monolanguage for development, better interoperability with C and C++, no garbage collection, and better performance. What turned out to be realized and relevant here? Please, no speculation or language flames or wars.
taf2 today at 12:29 AM
okay so does that mean openai buys deno?
threecheese yesterday at 8:05 PM
Interesting. Looking through a strategic lens, I feel like this is related to the $1,000 free credit for Claude Code Web (I used a few hundred). What the heck are they aiming for? CodeAct? (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030)
supportengineer yesterday at 6:58 PM
Curious, how did he pay the bills when spending these years developing Bun?
fud101 today at 2:37 AM
So this is a rug pull we were afraid of? Bun got me into javascript ecosystem after years of hating on it. This sucks.
tossandthrow today at 7:19 AM
Maybe now Claude will not assume that I use npm, and actually start using bun?
suralind yesterday at 6:38 PM
Good luck, always worried about stuff like that because it happened so many times and the product got worse eventually. At the same time, ai understand how much effort went into building something like Bun and people need to fund their life's somehow, so there's that.
terryds today at 12:54 AM
Wow.
bibimsz yesterday at 9:41 PM
bullish for js, bearish for python?
ryanvogel yesterday at 7:30 PM
intrepidsoldier yesterday at 8:34 PM
In other news - Amp Code is a separate company now - https://ampcode.com/news/amp-inc
m00dy today at 5:52 AM
who's going to buy deno ?
tibbydudeza yesterday at 6:25 PM
Reminds me of Atlassian buying an AI browser.
myth_drannon yesterday at 6:24 PM
First major success story for Zig language? (Not trying to diminish Bun's team success)
mrcwinn yesterday at 6:24 PM
Congrats. This is the first time I remember reading a genuine, authentic story about a sale. Much preferred over “this is about continuing the mission until my earn-out is complete.”
valbaca yesterday at 7:11 PM
> If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.

and when this bubble pops down goes bun

qsort yesterday at 6:22 PM
Anthropic? The AI people?
baxuz today at 10:53 AM
AI slop lovers both of them.
copperroof yesterday at 6:30 PM
Well this just created a lot of work for me. Everything’s turning to shit at an alarming rate.
patrick4urcloud yesterday at 8:56 PM
wow !
re-thc yesterday at 6:21 PM
Congrats...

> Long-term stability. a home and resources so people can safely bet their stack on Bun.

Isn't it the opposite? Now we've tied Bun to "AI" and if the AI bubble or hype or whatever bursts or dies down it'd impact Bun.

> We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.

There's honestly a higher chance of Bun sticking out that runway than the current AI hype still being around.

Nothing against Anthropic but with the circular financing, all the debt, OpenAI's spending and over-valuations "AI" is the riskier bet than Bun and hosting.

deleted yesterday at 8:58 PM
noodletheworld yesterday at 11:19 PM
If claude code starts having ads for bun in the code it generates, I am never using it again.

To some degree have “opinionated views on tech stacks” is unavoidable in LLMs, but this seems like it moves us towards a horrible future.

Imagine if claude (or gemini) let you as a business pay to “prefer” certain tech in generated code?

Its google ads all over again.

The thing is, if they own bun, and they want people to use bun, how can they justify not preferencing it on the server side?

…and once one team does it… game on!

It just seems like a sucky future, that is now going to be unavoidable.

moralestapia yesterday at 6:25 PM
What?

Why?

lkqjweflkj yesterday at 7:34 PM
Not to be confused with Bunn [1], the coffee maker makers.

[1] www.bunn.com

Sirikon yesterday at 8:55 PM
Hahahahahhaahhahahahahahhahahahahahhahahaha.

Regards.

Simran-B yesterday at 6:46 PM
Classic - brand new blog post:

> We’re hiring engineers.

Careers page:

> Sorry, no job openings at the moment.

123sereusername yesterday at 11:15 PM
[dead]
throwaway984393 yesterday at 6:21 PM
[dead]
tonyhart7 today at 9:23 AM
why not Antrophic just fork or make a clone Bun themselves????

/s

music4airports yesterday at 7:18 PM
[flagged]
clot27 yesterday at 7:40 PM
deno won, rust won
forrestthewoods yesterday at 8:16 PM
Why the hell is a CLI coding agent built in JavaScript?

It’s wild what happens when a generation of programmers doesn’t know anything except webdev. How far from grace we have fallen.

zwnow yesterday at 6:37 PM
Well not gonna use Bun anymore I guess
catapart yesterday at 7:16 PM
oh well. it was cool while it lasted! I guess I'll figure out how to make deno do what I want, now.
beanjuiceII yesterday at 6:38 PM
anthropic wont win, and will just get bought out by an ibm or oracle in the end...time to migrate from bun now