Apple taps Anthropic’s Claude for AI app development

In the latest act of the Apple-does-AI drama, the company is allegedly working with Google/Amazon-backed start-up Anthropic PBC to build AI-powered coding tools for developers, Bloomberg reports.

The move leans into this year’s fastest-emerging AI buzz-word, “vibe-coding” and means developers will be able to get AI-equipped dev tools to write, edit, and test code on their behalf. It relies on AI agents to generate code.

New features integrating Apple’s take on this will be integrated within its Xcode development environment, which might use Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI model, Bloomberg reported. Apple has been hoping to integrate AI into Xcode for some time.

Play it again, Claude 

With a growing reputation among developers, Claude has become a widely used chatbot across the AI community for a range of different tasks. 

Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead, DevOps and Application Development at The Futurum Group, told Devops: “Anthropic’s Claude Code is the developer’s AI developer tool.” In that kind of context, an Apple embrace makes sense if the reports are true.

Are they true? Apple hasn’t said anything about these plans, and I expect it has no intention of doing so this side of WWDC next month — if then.

The report says Apple intends to deploy the software internally at first and is apparently “undecided” on a public launch – but it could face some consternation from within its developer community if it doesn’t hint at something.

What about Swift Assist?

Apple has something like this in development in-house, the previously-announced Swift Assist tech. It was originally intended to ship last year but hasn’t yet appeared.

It’s assumed that development of Swift Assist, like development of so much that we were promised for Siri, foundered and the software remains unready. We don’t know much about why, but a propensity for hallucinations could be to blame.

Apple has since changed Siri’s leadership teams, bringing in its very best engineers to rescue efforts to make Siri smart again. This important work has also seen some senior leaders shunted aside, or even quietly demoted, enabling new teams a fresh start at cleaning up the problems left behind.

Within this last-ditch rescue attempt, Apple has adopted a “by any means necessary” approach to improving Siri. That approach includes using third-party solutions where it makes sense, rather than continuing to plow dev ground that hasn’t born fruit yet. This is likely what the reported partnership with Anthropic represents, suggesting Swift Assist will be either a more limited-than-intended suite of tools or rely on some kind of integration with third-party software such as Claude. 

Of course, until the rumors emerge via the usual outlets, the actual deployment model remains a matter for conjecture. That may also be true inside Apple, given that the go-to-market strategy still seems undecided based on the Bloomberg story. 

What’s the attraction of Claude? 

Anthropic’s Claude has been built to handle tasks more advanced than pattern recognition or text generation; it can create HTML, CSS, debugging code, and it can turn images into structured JSON data. Those abilities have obvious uses for app developers, potentially cutting costs and ramping up productivity. Apple also knows it needs to deliver tools like these as developers are rapidly growing to expect them — all major OS developers are embracing them.

That’s certainly what Anthropic CEO Drio Amodei expects will happen. In March, he explained that he expects AI will write the code for software engineers within three to six months and would be generating every line of code within a year. “I have a fair amount of concern” for jobs in the field, he said, warning of more impact in the future. Amodei said that while humans are needed today to make code that people like, over time AI will learn to do that on its own.

“I think that will happen in every industry,” he said. 

If this is true, then perhaps the limited in-person developer events now hosted in Cupertino will eventually be large enough to host all the human Apple developers that exist one day. 

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