Overview
- Brandon Thomas and the Artcraft team published seven open-source apps on Wednesday and Thursday that aim to replicate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro under names like Photocraft and Filmcraft.
- The projects were built using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, written in Rust with browser WebAssembly ports, and released under permissive MIT and Apache licenses with invitations for community contributions.
- Reviewers and early users report the apps are in a rough early alpha state with missing features and bugs, including unstable transform and content-aware workflows, and Thomas has scaled back an initial claim of one-month parity to a multi-month effort.
- Artcraft says development will be funded by selling token-based access to its existing visual-AI model and IDE, and the team has offered bug bounties and said it will support the projects, but long-term polishing and enterprise trust are unresolved.
- Legal experts note clean-room reimplementation can avoid direct copyright claims but trade-dress and patent challenges remain possible, and if the suite matures it could pressure subscription vendors like Adobe though significant technical and legal hurdles persist.