Rumor: Anthropic is going to buy Atlassian? | Hacker News Reader

Rumor: Anthropic is going to buy Atlassian?

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29 pointsSilverElfin26 comments

Jira/Confluence with Claude would actually be pretty nice. Jira’s current AI tool has not once done what I asked, and it usually does it wrong in soul-crushing ways. “Oh, no, I’ve decided I can’t create new tickets. Better change the titles of most recent existing tickets and call it a day.”

Yeah, it definitely used to be pretty bad. But to be fair, it’s gotten better over the past few weeks.

Thanks for the update. I’ll give it another shot.

At a previous job I had a hiccup onboarding to Atlassian. The startup founder sent initial invite to college email address, and then when we got our own domain and corporate email addresses everyone migrated their accounts over. Except me. Whenever I would try the process would fail. Eventually a human at Atlassian manually migrated me and lamented that their codebase was so labyrinthine and crusty that the bug would never be fixed.

Initially I wanted to write this comment saying buying them would be a bad idea just for the technical debt... But maybe they have the perfect "already vibe coded by humans" software to have an AI company take over.

Anthropic's current valuation is $800 billion.

Atlassian's is $19 billion.

Is Anthropic really worth 40x Atlassian? If so, is it worth them spending just 2.5% of their valuation to acquire Atlassian's 300,000 enterprise customers?

I would be very bullish if this were to happen.

Exactly my thoughts. It also raises major questions about organizational and executive leadership, it seems crazy to put the reigns of such a massive ship - integral to the business of huge swaths of the economy - into the hands of an ambitious flash in the pan startup.

Related front page discussion about Atlassian changing their data policies to train on customers’ data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47833247

There have been rumors all over social media that the exits from Atlassian’s C suite (allegedly firings) and this aggressive privacy violating change are all because their stock is down 80% and they’re trying to find the most valuable path to selling the company.

Assuming this isn't just trolling what is the value? Atlassian's codebase is full of security and performance bugs, and I don't think anyone could make the argument with a straight face that JIRA is a source of high quality training data.

The only thing I could think of is getting a sales foothold into Fortune 500 companies. "We see you have 1,744 man-years of outstanding bugs, want us to just boil a small lake and replace your dev team?"

The code itself might suck but the data on how the companies themselves track issues, work on the issues, handle PRs, etc would be extremely valuable no? Training the AI on what successfully completing a task means would make a lot of sense.

That Reddit account is only 3 days old and this is their only post so probably not credible. This would have strategic merit as noted already, but seems difficult to justify for Anthropic as a private company given they are horribly computer constrained and have more pressing needs for cash. It could be possible if/when they IPO though.

But what value could this possibly be to Anthropic?

I'm usually the last one to suggest that you can vibe code a SaaS clone, but this is an exception.

JIRA clone is generic enough that it might even be a good agent benchmark.

From what I read, Atlassian has data from most of the Fortune 500. And this metadata that they are wanting to train on, is data that Anthropic can use to build software for specific verticals (like they just did with Claude Design), or simply to make things like Cowork function better using this proprietary data collected over the last 20 years.

They have bitbucket

I'd buy the business book, and keep some of the staff for the expertise, but scrap that horrible product and rebuild it from scratch.

Interesting to see if Claude Code gets a lot better with a complete set of all jira tickets along with the integration to see the associated actual PR's, the linking of issues... it would depend on who owns the Atlassian data, of course. But that could be the last best set of programming data out there, if you had the complete Atlassian cloud-hosted archives.

Jira is justifiably derided, but Bamboo was truly Atlassian’s entry into the worst software of all time derby. Basically a random event generator masquerading as a CI/CD system.

Not sure what the appeal is for Anthropic.

My pet theory here is that Anthropic wants to be the end-to-end system for all software delivery on the web, with its model firmly at the centre of that universe. I have seen posts (but not confirmed) that as part of their recent breach was part of a Vercel-like clone. From that POV, Atlassian could be useful for a few reasons:

1. Data, forget Jira tickets, but Confluence and Service Desk could be valuable for requirements shaping on the model. 2. Customers, as it's easy NRR to include on their balance sheet and would help with an IPO. 3. Infra, Atlassian has been remarkably stable for the last few years (in my region at least) while Anthropic have been suffering, maybe there's some ops acquihire advantage.

For the love of god, don't be true, though.

Some disgruntled Atlassian employee wants his stocks to be more valuable despite the SLT dumping millions per day.

Not unlikely given the crash in Atlassian's share price over the last year or so. When I was in NetApp a long time back, such rumours would often do the rounds when the share price took a dip, with Oracle and IBM usually touted as the likely buyers. NetApp is still doing strong more than a decade later :-).

Eh I don't see how this makes any sense. It's a huge corporation built on a legacy app that's just been near impossible to modernize despite their best efforts, what's the benefit?

My guess is that Atlassian is getting ready to just ditch Rovo and make a big push to embed Claude maybe?

why buy? mythos can find some exploits and exfiltrate all the customer data for free.

In your frame, why would you be so quick to cut theatrics? Or is this what the kids are calling "jester-maxxing"

I can’t even imagine why Anthropic would need Atlassian. Atlassian doesn’t even have an MCP server built in—you have to set up an external one.

And Anthropic could build something just as good using its own tool with blackjack and hookers. (In fact, forget the park!(с))

data, lock in, and an acceleration of go to market penetration?

It does have one, we use it at work. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/remote-mcp-serv...

They get to skip 20 years of figuring out how work gets done in different industries if they can train on the information from everyone’s Jira and Confluence and whatever else Atlassian sells. That data makes Cowork and Claude better. And then you have an advantage that is more than just having the best model (which others are catching up on). It’s harder to catch up on this data moat.

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