With Claude Code now supporting artifacts, enterprises can turn what they create with Claude Code into shareable, updatable visual pages.
Using Claude Code and artifacts, developers can build an artifact using the full context of a user session, including the codebase, connectors and conversation. Each artifact is private to the author until it is shared with approved members. Artifacts come after OpenAI introduced Sites for Codex, which enables users to build, host and deploy interactive web applications.
Anthropic’s introduction of artifacts, on June 18, along with Sites for Codex, underscores how AI model providers continue to expand their services, offering enterprises features that cloud providers also provide, such as hosting and managing websites. By providing these services, AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI are, in a sense, becoming mini cloud providers.
“Everybody is a cloud provider these days,” said Bradley Shimmin, an analyst at Futurum Group. “If we thought that we were talking about the collapse of SaaS using AI, if anything, we’re talking about the explosion of SaaS because of AI.”
A Type of Hosting Service
By launching artifacts, Anthropic is providing tools that help enterprises share and visualize what developers have created across teams. Instead of an enterprise having to create an actual application that is managed and hosted by a cloud provider, it can produce a shareable artifact using Claude Code, which requires less management than an actual app.
“You don’t have to stand up a virtual private cloud somewhere as you normally would,” Shimmin said. He added that much of what developers create with Claude Code does not require building an app to be managed. Most of the time, the coding outputs are one-off links that users can share to share items like quarterly numbers or data, so they do not require the resources or effort that an actual application does.
“It’s a lightweight, easily accessible way to get to, as they so rightfully say, artifacts that you create inside of these generative AI environments,” Shimmin said.
However, enterprises that want an application that stores and manages data over time would need a full hosting and management service, such as Vercel or Amazon EC2.
“It’s not a persistent traditional backend system app,” Shimmin added. Features like artifacts also show how model providers such as Anthropic are giving enterprises tools that produce deterministic outputs that can be easily seen and shared within an enterprise.
“It’s basically like your own self-contained code module,” said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. “You can build a best practices function to do a certain thing, like I want to have my Monday morning report pulled out, straight pulled out from Salesforce.”
“You can publish it to your enterprise artifact store, and then everybody can use it,” he continued. “It’s like a little library of code snippets that you can share with your team.”
