If there is very little benefit to them by releasing it, that's a lack of imagination on their part. Being able to disrupt Microsofts, dare I say, number one beachhead into developers and their development ecosystem and bringing AI first developers into Anthropics own vertical AI development ecosystem is pretty damn core to winning the future potential avenue for the software industry at large. It won't pay off in the next five years, but it could pay off big in ten.
Imagine waking up next week and Claude Code now ships free with builtin source control management via this tech with a better user experience than workspaces. Github and Microsoft would take an instant market share hit in the traffic that they swear is causing all of their outages. And then that cuts off Microsofts access to code to train their own LLMs on in the background, further hampering an Anthropic competitor in the AI race.
Imagine waking up next week and Claude Code now ships free with builtin source control management via this tech with a better user experience than workspaces. Github and Microsoft would take an instant market share hit in the traffic that they swear is causing all of their outages. And then that cuts off Microsofts access to code to train their own LLMs on in the background, further hampering an Anthropic competitor in the AI race.