Anthropic Acquires Stainless to Strengthen Developer Tooling

Anthropic launched Claude Science, an AI workbench designed to consolidate scientific tools and datasets for researchers, at its 'The Briefing: AI for Science' event this week. The company framed the product around accelerating scientific discovery and healthcare development, citing existing biotech and pharma customers. Anthropic also announced it would develop drugs itself, expanding beyond its current role as an AI tool provider.

Alibaba Group has banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude and ordered them to remove all Claude models from work computers, citing security concerns about Anthropic. The directive was communicated to some employees on Friday. The ban affects Alibaba's workforce and signals growing tension around AI tool adoption in large enterprises.

Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI chip, according to sources with direct knowledge of the project. The move mirrors OpenAI's strategy of developing proprietary chips to reduce dependence on external computing infrastructure and control costs. Google, Amazon Web Services, Meta, and Microsoft have all developed their own chips, while OpenAI unveiled Jalapeno, an inference chip designed for large-language models, last month.

Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5, a model positioned as a more affordable alternative to its Opus offering and competitors like GPT-5.5 and Gemini Pro. The new model delivers stronger agentic capabilities, lower pricing, and improved safety features. The release targets organizations looking to deploy AI agents at reduced operational cost.