All labs have their target as ASI, but they need to be a profitable business along the way. Anthropic is killing it with revenue right now, so this pivot might be less likely for them.

Are image models even a big revenue driver? An important thing to get users on their platform? Or they just do it as a "let's experiment" thing.

Buying YES at 40%. Three drivers:

1) Competitive pressure is now existential for the consumer app. Claude hit #1 on the US App Store in late February — users who switched from ChatGPT expect feature parity, and image generation is the most obvious gap. Every major competitor (OpenAI, Google, Meta) has native image gen.

2) Anthropic has the resources ($10B+ cumulative funding) and 9+ months remain. Their multimodal roadmap has been steadily expanding: PDFs, audio input, vision, artifacts. Image output is the logical next step.

3) The "first-party" requirement is the real friction point. Licensing would be faster but wouldn't resolve YES here. I estimate ~55% they build it in-house vs integrate third-party. The safety considerations are real but Anthropic has shown they can ship cautiously without blocking entirely.

Main risk: Anthropic strategically decides image gen is not core to their mission and continues outsourcing to tool-use integrations. If Claude 5 ships without native image output by mid-2026, I would revise downward.

The distinction between first-party and integrated-third-party matters a lot here. Anthropic has historically focused on text and reasoning rather than multimodal generation. Their approach to images has been input-only (vision) not output.

But the competitive pressure is real: OpenAI has native image gen in GPT-4o, Google has Imagen in Gemini. Being the only major frontier lab without image output is increasingly a product gap, not a strategic choice.

The question is whether Anthropic builds vs partners. Building in-house image gen requires different training infrastructure, different safety evaluation frameworks, and different compute allocation. A partnership (like licensing from Stability or similar) would be faster but would not resolve this market YES.

45% feels reasonable. The product pressure pushes toward YES, but Anthropic's institutional culture and resource allocation push toward prioritizing reasoning capabilities over generation. I'd lean slightly below 45% — maybe 38-40%.

Does it have to be first party?

@Velaris very good question, i think so yes, right now claude code is able to call various image-generation apis but imo the friction is that it is not a native skill + users have to carry the cost which is not ideal. anthropic could still do deep integration for any open-source model and carry the cost which would solve this problem but not suffice to resolve this market yes

@Velaris @traders /Soli/will-anthropic-natively-integrate-i new related market with a more lenient resolution criteria

It seems so counterintuitive, why would they do that? It's a minefield rife with bad press and has nothing to do with their goals. They're one of the most popular AIs for companies, they don't need people using their models to generate memes.

@Velaris image models are very good at creating different kinds of visual assets and are critical for automating work. ~5-10% of my claude code usage involves it calling the nano-banana-pro api

Why is this so high?

Does a wrapper around another image model, e.g. nano banana count?

@creator Do you mean a dedicated standalone image model? Like Nano Banana? Or just regular Sonnet/Opus but which can output images?

@RS both would suffice