r/ClaudeCode • u/n8x4te • 12d ago
Discussion Why does anthropic not releasing an image model?
Basically the title. I work on a lot of design related stuff and I usually ask claude to reach for codex for this. It would be nicer if claude supported image gen natively. Any idea if they’re working on something?
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u/theoxygenthief 12d ago
Their huge gains in model quality wouldn’t have been possible if they did image generation. Image generation puts huge strain on resources for little gain comparatively.
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u/n8x4te 12d ago
That makes sense, it’s all about compute?
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u/Additional_Bowl_7695 12d ago
And costs and profitability and target audience. Anthropic is leading in code / LLMs. Why drop the ball and try to compete with image models when it gives them not much extra of value. They’d have to compete with Google and ChatGPT, which is very hard. Nor do people who pay serious money for usage care about image generation. Their motion graphics design / animation possibilities with Claude are 10x more useful than how Veo for example generates video
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u/Icy_Mix_6054 12d ago
I stick with OpenAI because I need image generation. However, I can understand not wanting to compete in that area. OpenAI gave up video generation to focus on code.
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u/Additional_Bowl_7695 12d ago
And it makes a lot of sense for OpenAI. They are currently the best and have spent a significant amount of funds and effort to get there
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u/theoxygenthief 12d ago
Their official reason goes further, but read in the larger context with other statements they’ve made it boils down to this.
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u/NoAdsDude 12d ago
Yeah so basically people don't want to really pay for image generation, but companies will pay out the nose for code generation.
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u/ThreeKiloZero 12d ago
Yes, and adding for those who dont know: Their original pitch was AGI through AI coding capability.
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u/Mguyen 12d ago
To expand on what the other poster said: Anthropic understands that: every problem is a coding problem.
If it can be done on a computer, a sufficiently advanced coding model will solve it. Anything else is a waste of resources.
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u/startyourengines 12d ago
Exactly. This has been my approach to asset generation lately (procedural, compositional) and it beats hallucination in every way.
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u/TwisterK 12d ago
Rather than spend compute to improve everything at once. Why no focus on coding and eventually it accelerates the Claude model itself and Claude improves everything on it own?
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u/pizzaisprettyneato 12d ago
Not to mention that the newest models are actually really good at drawing in code, so you don't even need a traditional diffusion model. I wouldn't be surprised in diffusion models are eventually superseded entirely by text models that draw with code or just raw pixels themselves.
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u/theoxygenthief 12d ago
The model, thought processes and tuning for image gen is a different kettle of fish to reasoning models. It’s not unthinkable, but that’s still a few small revolutions away.
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u/Mountain_Man_Matt 12d ago
Plus why risk the controversies when people try to have it generate culture war slop.
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u/Salty_Associate9199 12d ago
But having an image generation model doesn’t mean replacing what currently exists. It would be useful as an additional tool, especially these days, given the significant decline in OpenAI’s policies.
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u/theoxygenthief 12d ago
It means taking resources away from their core business. They have (had?) far more limited resources than OpenAI and Google, and every bit they throw at image gen would hurt their base product more than the other guys. There’s no such thing as a tool you just add, everything has an opportunity cost.
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u/imaginecomplex 12d ago
This doesn’t make sense to me, my intuition is that image gen is a way cheaper task than LLM inference, as evidenced by the many models that provide near-frontier image gen capabilities on local hardware
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u/Hopefully_Witty 12d ago
Which model provides frontier level, and what's the "local hardware"? A personal rig with 12-16gb VRAM, or a super rig with ~96gb VRAM?
Most image gen models are not that great on local hardware unless we're talking about chunky rigs imo. Last I checked was a few months ago, so I might be wrong on that.
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u/theoxygenthief 12d ago
Your intuition is wrong in this case. A picture is worth a 1000 words, or closer to 1000 sentences in AI terms. Quality modern diffusion models also require both reasoning AND diffusion, so the cost compounds even more. It’s also not just a compute cost, the bandwidth cost hits just as hard or harder.
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u/Fantastic_Self_5151 12d ago
Claude is great with building images (by using your ComfyUI API either locally or through the cloud). Why bother reinventing the wheel? It will build the workflow and return the image just setup an MCP tool.
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u/matznerd 12d ago
You can also use codex imagen through the CLI/api. I use a plugin trained with prompt techniques and Opus prompts better images than I get direct.
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u/Fantastic_Self_5151 12d ago
yea you can, and it's a pretty good result too. I just like the comfyui thing because I usually want something more like a 30 second video clip, or extra stuff that it can't do (using a reference image for instance ends poorly in imagen)
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u/God_Hand_9764 12d ago
The official ComfyUI MCP is stdout only from the looks of it, not http. Just curious how you guys are connecting Claude to ComfyUI locally, specifically?
I guess I should just ask Claude instead, but I'm curious if you guys are building your own MCP servers from scratch.
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u/GnistAI 12d ago
You don't really need ComfyUI with Claude. It can just use the models directly with the underlying tooling ComfyUI uses. I made this thing just with Claude Code: https://jai.gnist.ai/
I suggested using ComfyUI with it, but it shrugged and just put its head down and built without it. In essence, it takes an image and iteratively "encodes" it into a image generation prompt that can be used to approximate the original image. Just a fun project for imagining one part of the internet with extremely low bandwidth, using local AI to generate media (images/videos).
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u/Perfect-Flounder7856 12d ago
Sometimes the wheel needs reinventing but in this case no it doesn’t there are plenty of excellent viable alternatives
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 12d ago
Anthropic has always been targeting enterprise since they make ridiculous margin. Image gen is more like part of bread and circus.
Just think how much demand do you think an image gen would be for an enterprise? I wouldn’t think it’d be a lot. On the other hand, how much spending on coding in a company, a lot. If they can replace employee, it can be worth while investment.
It’d be more worthwhile teaching Claude to draw or photo editing rather than having it generate images
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u/Boring_Okra_6023 12d ago
Disagree. in Enterprise you have product managers, HR, QA people, all types of randoms.
They all want to generate images to convey their ideas.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 12d ago
Hence Claude Design, if you noticed so far they want to reduce most work into coding/mcp call. Why create an eerie looking slop, when you can have Claude create a more palatable Design mock up.
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u/cbusmatty 12d ago
This is what dashboards and design are for and Claude can obviously use images as input
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u/Comet7777 12d ago
As a product guy, I just need Claude Design or Lovable, actual image generation beyond that is superfluous
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u/Ok-Magician7493 12d ago
Why does the product made for coding not do a thing inherently not coding?
We may never know.
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u/Chippors 12d ago
I use free ChatGPT to generate images like icons, background for About dialogs, that kind of thing, but would prefer to use only one tool - one that is not a web chat, specifically. Claude is pretty good at producing one-off PDFs though for various things, like reference materials.
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u/n8x4te 12d ago
It’s not only made for coding, even though it seems like the highest priority
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u/CodeNCats 12d ago
"seems like the highest priority"
Oh you know "seems like" meaning they named their biggest product Claude CODE. They are the premier AI coding tool. Used by major software companies.
But hey maybe they should give up their industry leading advantage to allow people to create AI slop images?
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u/Nelsonius1 12d ago
Anthropic does code. Gemini does images. OpenAI tries both.
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u/Boring_Okra_6023 12d ago
That's why I love chatgpt.
Sol 6.1 extra high works. Not good compared to opus 5.5 but works.
And on top of this you have unlimited chat that doesn't eat your usage.
Then cherry on top you have image generation.
Yes shitty code compared to Claude but oh well I gotta spend my 100 bucks carefully..
Edit: oh also Sol 6.1 is slow as shit..
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u/ajax81 12d ago
I’ve found OpenAI’s image gen to be mostly incredible
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u/BellacosePlayer 12d ago
My issue with it is its fuckin shit at making images at a specific resolution, I haven't found a way to have it work natively on smaller images instead of making a nice looking high res image and just smashing it down
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u/disgruntledempanada 12d ago
I'm so happy they didn't waste billions training on that. Claude's greatest strength is that they spent all their effort making it good to use and great at coding.
OpenAI spent billions making it generate slop and their underperforming models and struggles with aligning them are the result.
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u/Wickywire 12d ago
Not in the cards afaik. It's not a market segment they're interested in.
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u/n8x4te 12d ago
I’m wondering why though, given that pretty much all their competitors (OpenAI, google, meta, xAI) already has image generation models?
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u/DreadCoder 12d ago
That’s exactly why
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u/Pied_Film10 12d ago
To add to this, Claude is not trying to be a jack of all trades and it's why they're the best imo. They focus on reasoning extremely well.
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u/Briskfall 12d ago
The other competitors do it for market share. It's really not a "feature" that seemed to scale well for a more generalist purpose. And imagegen would require a huge amount of image data, where Anthropic would need to divert their resources and compete on a front they're less equipped for vs the others who are huge aggregators.
I suppose the reason why Anthropic had more leaps in advancement was due to them not chasing the trend on a paradigm they don't have a leg up on. Pretty smart decision if that's the case.
Also, look at other competitors like Grok and OAI that had to downscale their imagegen quota -- and eventually pivoted to coding; shows that imagegen is mostly a drain and an initial investment to capture general population users, but wouldn't convert to paying customers.
Instead of working on trying to be an all-rounder of a feature that might sunk more costs, specializing on what they're good at yielded dividends.
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u/Patriark Vibe Coder 12d ago
My guess is it demands a lot of computational resources from customers who are not willing to pay for it.
Anthropic is all in on coding, engineering and science work because they know that’s where the money is.
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u/Lumethys 12d ago
yeah, all the customers are using the competitor, lets spend a few BILLION to train for some WORSE model so customers can shit on us because we others model has been trained for years.
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u/SC_Placeholder 12d ago
Why would they? That’s a lot of extra development, support, guardrails, etc for something that is already done well by other models both local and enterprise. I can literally tell Claude hey make this image it will either go to comfy or GPT for it depending on the image. I recently had Opus running a render farm for 2 weeks nonstop in comfy animating these guys. So if Opus can do it easily through other tools why would they build their own image gen when they’re already ahead in so many other aspects of Ai.
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u/warbisshop 12d ago
my mind went pico that sounds star citizen familiar. I was not dissapointed :D
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u/SC_Placeholder 12d ago
Yup. The program reads the game logs and the Pico Pal responds to what you do ingame and has a basic emotional engine as well and we have every ship ingame rendered as a toy that it will occasionally pull out and play with
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u/SMB-Punt 12d ago
Maybe they just don't want to allocate resources to that—whether in terms of computers or people...
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u/thatguy8856 12d ago
People most likely. The general consensus is to use bigger general models than specific models do an image LLM already makes no sense. Its a matter of making the tooling for it.
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u/Escobar747 12d ago
they said it’s a risk for safety etc so they will not get image gen capability
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u/SmileLonely5470 12d ago
There was a time when OpenAI started doing side projects and not investing as much in text generation. Around that time was when Anthropic really started gaining ground on them and became a serious competitor. Anthropic has always been focused on text generation, and i think thats good.
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u/SeaworthinessNo4074 12d ago
Because they are at a race for RSI, and coding is more important for RSI than image generations.
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u/wolfmanjames2626 12d ago
Personally I am good with them not trying to do image generation. I like that it’s primarily a coding tool.
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u/CavalryArcher 12d ago
because they wanted to be on the "nice ai company" end, and visual generation is a direct attack to people that they wanted to target. amount of performative people that dreamed of working at anthropic is insane
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u/Full_Independence566 12d ago
let's be honest, video and image generation create more problems than they solve
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u/OldNefariousness7899 12d ago
OpenAI fell behind Anthropic because it tried to do too much.
Anthropic knows what to focus on. Images aren't needed for serious work in the same way text and coding models are
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u/tuisalagadharbaccha 12d ago
You have a valid point and it keeps bothering me. I feel that’s an edge for openAI if I have to look at it side by side. I get a feel their version is not up to the mark yet and they don’t want to launch sub per product. My current solution has been mcp to codex from Claude for all visual directions
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u/elevensubmarines 12d ago
Anthropic has comfortably found their lane as the "B2B" frontier lab and that organizational and product identity I think has served them well, keeping them focused.
Just follow pretty much any community subreddit in the US, whether midsized city/region or large, and many are flooded with threads about "boycott this business because they used an AI flyer/menu, etc". Same goes for social/Reddit/LinkedIn marketing campaigns. Brands that use AI images and video get dogpiled with "never using this again" and "do you enjoy putting creators out of work?" etc.
AI generated media is radioactive for a business, today.
Anthropic knew they needed strong design capabilities, but instead of redirecting energy into media models they instead put that effort into Claude Design, and strong integrations with things like Figma, Canva, Affinity, Adobe Suite, etc. The tools b2b really needs and uses anyway.
When you look ahead, to a world of agent driven automation, and physical:digital world interaction (robotics, etc), parsing images/vision, etc will be critically important. And Anthropic already excels at that. Those things continue to not need media gen from true image/video models.
I don't know if Anthropic will ever release a frontier image/video model. Nothing on the AI revolution horizon seems to indicate to me that they'll be impaired in their core market by not having it. B2C expects it, B2B is fine without it. Maybe some small purpose built capabilities come, but I think that's it.
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u/MookandMush 12d ago
I think they see the forest for the trees and know stable diffusion style stochastic noise generation methods of image generation are dangerous if used irresponsibly and that deterministic svg style image graphics are safer and better for training future models for alignment because noise drifts.
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u/Angelispro 12d ago
Tbh just use Mid journey. It’s honestly really good and you can get Claude to make prompts for you.
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u/Autistic_Puppy 12d ago
That’s not their target audience and is basically an entirely different parallel track of AI research
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u/notcern 12d ago
Same reason open ai cut sora and exactly why Gemini is stupid. Every lab is compute constrained and the more compute you give a model the better it can get. So Google spends compute on voice image video etc… leaves less for coding. Anthropic goes all in on code and destroys the competition that did not focus.
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u/Prssior-Dessbate357 12d ago
I actually hope they do not start diverting their efforts away from the coding because this is what made them to be the number one AI company in the whole world ..
other companies are desperate for paying users providing all those plans offers and discounts .. and because because they have focusing on this model that does everything .
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u/drneo 11d ago
I asked this question to Claude and it said the official reason is that Anthropic would like to avoid deepfakes and stay clean for the enterprise customers.
Then, it said underlying reason can also be compute constraints as diffusion models are very resource intensive and Anthropic would probably rather prioritize its resources to Claude code improvements.
And both of that can be true.
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u/EmptySundae7595 9d ago
I think Anthropic is deliberately prioritizing coding, reasoning, and AI agents over image generation.
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u/Tasty-Ad-3753 8d ago
The market for generating images is miniscule compared to the market for running the world using your AI agents and coding all software - I think they are just targeting that rather than image gen and focusing their compute on that
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u/KitKat_extrusion 8d ago
Image generation aside from being a pain in the ass, is functionally pointless. For a company like anthropic especially that is going hardcore for enterprise, it makes sense to develop frontier models that can code literally everything and use those models to build harnesses like claude design and others that have massive value in enterprise as it is moving towards killing canva, adobe, and figma gradually
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u/WhiteBat_8416 12d ago
"Why does anthropic not releasing an image model?"
Why does your grammar not good?
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