Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Anthropic acquired Stainless this month, a leading firm specialized in SDKs and MCP server tooling, a transaction that takes place in a context where AI models are shifting from models that answer to agents that act.

Analysts estimated that Anthropic paid over $300 million for this company, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, although the official terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2022 and based in New York, Stainless has powered Anthropic’s SDK since the earliest days of its API.

Many companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors developers use to interact with APIs.

Stainless turns an API spec into SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, and more. Stainless’s software is also widely used by rivals OpenAI and Google, as well as others such as Replicate, Runway, and Cloudflare.

Going forward, the Stainless tools will only be available to Anthropic, not its competitors.

Therefore, the acquisition will take a key infrastructure supplier out of the hands of Anthropic’s competitors.

“Agents are only as useful as what they can connect to. We’re excited to bring the Stainless team into Anthropic to advance Claude’s ability to connect to data and tools,” said Katelyn Lesse, Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic — a company that created MCP to make agent connectivity possible.

IBL News | New York

Pope Leo XIV’s document “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” made public on Monday, has sparked a global conversation on how to handle AI from a moral perspective.

Pope Leo XIV  has sparked a global conversation on how to handle AI from a moral perspective.

The Pontifex tried to inject Catholic moral values into a secular American industry that is transforming the world at lightning speed.

“Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Leo wrote.

After being a major critic of immigration crackdowns and war, challenging, without intending to, the political leadership of his home country, Pope Leo XIV has added AI to that list, taking on Silicon Valley.

Leo, the first pope from the United States, called on Monday for A.I. to be “disarmed,” similar to the church’s support for nuclear disarmament, meaning “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he explained in a speech at the Vatican.

The launch event for the encyclical document was attended by high-powered AI pioneer Christopher Olah [in the picture above], a co-founder of Anthropic, which is pursuing a trillion-dollar valuation.

For the Pope, the way forward must involve collaboration, said Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago.

Leo opened his remarks with a special thank you to Mr. Olah, almost as if he were a head of state. “In turn, in the name of the church, I accept your invitation to walk together to listen and to speak and together to find the way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence,” Leo said.

Church leaders under Pope Francis regularly held meetings called the “Minerva Dialogues” with technology leaders to discuss AI developments. Pope Francis met with the Group of 7 leaders in 2024 and urged regulation and called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

Leo’s document, called an encyclical, is in many ways a culmination of that effort.

“At key moments in history, the Church is called to decipher the ‘new things’ in the light of the Gospel and the dignity of the human being,” Leo said. “Today we find ourselves facing a transformation of similar magnitude, with perhaps even greater consequences.”

Catholic universities in the U.S., including Georgetown and Santa Clara, have taken significant steps to advance the conversation about AI and Catholic moral values in academic and public circles.

The University of Notre Dame received a $50 million grant from the Lilly Endowment in December to develop faith-based ethical frameworks for AI through its Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.