Anthropic has made its first acquisition, purchasing JavaScript runtime developer Bun as its Claude Code agent reaches a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate just six months after launch. The deal marks a strategic push into developer tooling for the artificial intelligence (AI) startup as it seeks to scale coding infrastructure.
AI Generated Image
The acquisition will help accelerate Claude Code, which has been adopted by major enterprises including Netflix, Spotify and Salesforce since becoming generally available in May. Anthropic said Bun will be "instrumental in helping us build the infrastructure for the next generation of software."
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The deal follows major funding commitments from tech giants, with Microsoft and Nvidia pledging up to $15 billion in fresh investment last month alongside a $30 billion commitment from Anthropic to run Claude Code on Microsoft’s cloud platform.
The move underscores Anthropic's disciplined growth strategy focused on enterprise customers and coding workloads. Internal financials show the company expects to break even by 2028—two years ahead of rival OpenAI—as it pursues a more measured path to profitability.
First Acquisition Targets Developer Infrastructure
Founded by Jarred Sumner in 2021, Bun serves as an all-in-one software toolkit combining runtime, package manager, bundler and test runner. The platform has gained significant traction with over 7 million monthly downloads and more than 82,000 stars on GitHub.
Anthropic had been using Bun for several months before the acquisition. According to Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger, the collaboration was central to the recent launch of Claude Code's native installer. "Jarred and his team rethought the entire JavaScript toolchain from first principles while remaining focused on real use cases," Krieger said in a LinkedIn post.
Bun will remain open source and MIT-licensed following the acquisition. The company said it will continue investing in making Bun the tool of choice for JavaScript and TypeScript developers while integrating enhanced capabilities into Claude Code.
Different Path to Profitability with OpenAI
Anthropic's measured approach stands in stark contrast to OpenAI's aggressive expansion strategy. Financial documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal last month show Anthropic projects breaking even in 2028 while OpenAI forecasts operating losses of $74 billion that year—roughly three-fourths of revenue.
OpenAI expects to burn through approximately 14 times as much cash as Anthropic before turning a profit in 2030. The ChatGPT maker is investing heavily in chips, data centers and stock-based compensation while pursuing costly ventures into video generation, hardware and consumer products.
Anthropic is focusing on corporate customers, which account for roughly 80% of revenue, and avoiding compute-intensive image and video generation. This year, Anthropic expects to burn almost $3 billion on $4.2 billion in sales-- about 70% of revenue, matching OpenAI’s ratio. However, Anthropic forecasts its cash burn dropping to roughly one-third of revenue in 2026 and 9% in 2027, while OpenAI's remains at 57% in 2026.
Growing Competitive Position
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff including Dario Amodei, Anthropic was recently valued at $183 billion compared with OpenAI’s $500 billion reported valuation in October. The company has attracted backing from tech's largest players, with Amazon investing $8 billion and Google committing $3 billion in addition to the recent Microsoft-Nvidia funding.
Claude Code's rapid revenue growth—reaching the $1 billion milestone in November—demonstrates strong market acceptance among enterprise customers. The coding agent allows developers to write, debug and interpret code through natural-language instructions, positioning Anthropic as a leader in AI-powered software development tools.
