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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#241

Post by 1shooner »

simonw wrote: post #190
tyingq wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had the cash, I could sell dollar bills for 50 cents and do a $7b run rate :)

If that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health. I don't think they're doing that. Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl...

>The bank's analysts then assumed Anthropic gross profit margins of 60%, and estimated that 75% of related costs are spent on AWS cloud services.

Not estimate, assumption.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#242

Post by JumpCrisscross »

KK7NIL wrote: post #148
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was an acquihire, still a lot less slimy than just offering the employees they care about a large compensation package and leaving the company behind as a husk like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have done recently.

Is it? What's wrong with hiring talent for a higher salary? You have no responsibility for an unrelated company's operations; if that was important to them they could have paid their talent more.

From the acquirer’s perspective, you’re right. (Bonus: it diminishes your own employees’ ability to leave and fundraise to compete with you.)

From an ecosystem perspective, acquihires trash the funding landscape. And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward. But that isn’t relevant if the individual pay-off is big.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#243

Post by sulam »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #188
smcleod wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably about 95% of mine now. Much better than I could for the most part.

Weird, AI writes terrible code for me that would never pass a code review. I guess people have different standards for good code.

Or maybe he's working in a space that is less out of distribution than the work you're doing?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#244

Post by defen »

pjmlp wrote: post #186
Tiberium wrote: post #35

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 t…

Agreed, the language would be interesting during the 1990's, nowadays not so much. The tools that the language offers to handle use after free is hardly any different from using Purify, Insure++ back in 2000.

I find comments like this fascinating, because you're implicitly evaluating a counterfactual where Bun was built with Rust (or some other "interesting" language). Maybe Bun would be better if it were built in Rust. But maybe it would have been slower (either at runtime or development speed) and not gotten far enough along to be acquired by one of the hottest companies in the world. There's no way to know. Why did Anthropic choose Bun instead of Deno, if Deno is written in a better language?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#245

Post by mjr00 »

mokarma wrote: post #122

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"

Why didn't they just use AI to write their own Bun instead of wasting 8-9 figures on this company? Makes no sense.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#246

Post by baq »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #59
zelphirkalt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it would probably be back to Poetry. Or some other newcomer, or maybe a fork of uv.

Honestly, given the constant rollercoaster of version management and building tools for Python the move to something else would be expected rather than surprising. I’ve seems like a great tool, but I remember thinking the same about piping, too.

uv is a revolution in every possible positive sense of the word in the Python world and I've been here since 1.5. it is imperative that bitter oldtimers like us try it, I did and the only regret I've got is that I didn't do it sooner.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#247

Post by smcleod »

sinatra wrote: post #224
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, AI writes terrible code for me that would never pass a code review. I guess people have different standards for good code.

Hah. It can’t be “I need to spend more time to figure out how to use these tools better.” It is always “I’m just smarter than other people and have a higher standard.”

Spot on.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#249

Post by velcrovan »

serial_dev wrote: post #179
mritchie712 wrote: post #68

> 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 monetizat…

> I believe this a bit less. They weren’t acquired and got paid just to build tooling as before and now completely ignoring monetization until the end of times.

Maybe they were though. Maybe Anthropic just wanted to bring a key piece of the stack in-house.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#250

Post by daheza »

homebrewer wrote: post #129
TheFlyingFish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used Deno, but I do use Bun purely as a replacement for npm. It does the hard-linking thing that seems to be increasingly common for package managers these days (i.e. it populates your local node_modules with a bunch of hard links to its systemwide cache), which makes it vastly quicker and more disk-efficient than npm for most usage. Even with a cold cache, `bun install` with a large-ish dependency graph is…

pnpm does all that on top of node. Also disables postinstall scripts by default, making the recent security incidents we've seen a non-issue.

Are there any popular packages that require postinstall scripts that this hurts?
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