Incredible news on so, so many levels!

(1) Bun is what technical startups should be. Consistently excellent decisions, hyper focused on user experience, and a truly excellent technical product.

(2) We live in a world where TUIs are causing billion dollar acquisitions. Think about that. Obviously, Bun itself is largely orthogonal to the TUIs. Just another use case. But also obviously, they wouldn't have been acquired like this without this use case.

(3) There's been questions of whether startups like Bun can exist. How will they make money? When will they have to sell out one of the three principles in (1) to do so? The answer seems to be that they don't; at least, not like we expected, and in my opinion not in a sinister way.

A sinister or corrupting sell out would be e.g. like Conan. What started as an excellent tool became a bloated, versioned mess as they were forced to implement features to support the corporate customers that sustained them.

This feels different. Of course, there will be some selling out. But largely the interests of Anthropic seem aligned with "build the best JS runtime", since Anthropic themselves must be laser focused on user experience with Claude Code. And just look at Opencode [^1] if you want to see what leaning all the way into Bun gets you. Single file binary distribution, absurdly fast, gorgeous. Their backend, OpenTUI [^2], is a large part of this, and was built in close correspondence with the Bun folks. It's not something that could exist without Bun, in my opinion.

(4) Anthropic could have certainly let Bun be a third party to which they contributed. They did not have to purchase them. But they did. There is a strange not-quite altruism in this; at worst, a casting off of the exploitation of open source we often see from the biggest companies. Things change; what seems almost altruistic now could be revealed to be sinister, or could morph into such. But for now, at least, it feels good and right.

[^1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode [^2]: https://github.com/sst/opentui