The day that Anthropic released its newest AI model last month, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch held an all-hands meeting at his company’s headquarters in San Francisco. He started with a set of slides outlining key moments in the (brief) history of AI coding. It kicked off with Github Copilot in 2021 (“it could barely complete code”), then to ChatGPT a year later (coding ended up being “a killer use case”), on to Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 in 2024 (which “could clearly be trusted” with smaller bits of code).

Anthropic’s latest, Opus 4.6, felt like another one of those milestones. “This is going to be a big moment for the world,” he recalls telling his staff. It’s certainly made an impression: Claude Code, long a front runner in the AI coding wars, has begun to break away further. The model is so impressive that shortly after it was released, it triggered the so-called “SaaSpocalypse,” wiping away billions of dollars in value from global software-as-a-service stocks as investors worried those firms could be automated away.

It was a jumpscare for the market, but may be a harbinger of good news for Vercel, which helps developers to build, deploy and host web apps, and now, AI agents. It’s a classic picks and shovels story — selling supplies to the miners feverishly exploiting the gold rush: With the glut of new code generated thanks to AI, someone’s got to host it. “We've seen a tremendous acceleration on deployments,” Rauch says. “Fundamentally, we want to become the infrastructure layer of this new generation of software.”

Vercel isn’t a household name like OpenAI or Google, but it’s a crucial vendor for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Under Armour, Stripe and Sonos, who use Vercel to host their digital infrastructure. (One of the most popular ways to view the Epstein Files, an interface called Jmail that mimics a Gmail inbox, is hosted on Vercel.) In September, the company raised $300 million, co-led by blueblood venture firm Accel and GIC, one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. The fundraising round lifted the startup’s valuation to $9.3 billion, up from $3.25 billion the year before. The influx of cash also makes Rauch, an Argentine immigrant, a billionaire, worth at........

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