Brandon Thomas did not go after Adobe because Photoshop is easy to copy. By his own account, he went after it because he had “stumbled over the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.” Most coverage of his free, AI-built Adobe clones has treated that line as colour. It is the part of the story Adobe should be reading most closely.

The clones are not the threat. Thomas, a Rust developer who now writes code exclusively with AI tools, calls them a “super early alpha,” and the boast that launched the story — “software is over” — has already been walked back once. What has changed is how cheap it has become to make an Adobe replacement look plausible, and how many reasons Adobe has given users to want one.

What Artcraft actually shipped

Artcraft started as a tool for editing AI-generated images and video. Over a single weekend, Thomas turned it into a suite of seven open-source apps that recreate the interface and tools of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro, under the names PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft and PrintCraft. They are written in Rust, licensed under MIT and Apache, and have WebAssembly versions that run in a browser. Thomas says he built them with Anthropic‘s Claude Opus 5.5 and describes them as “clean-room replacements”: the behaviour is rebuilt, the source code is not copied.

The most advanced piece is PhotoCraft. According to iFun.de, it already opens and saves Photoshop’s PSD files and offers layers, masks, adjustment layers and more than 70 filters. The other six are much further behind. On Reddit, Thomas promised “100% [feature] parity within a month.” On Hacker News, once commenters began listing what was missing, the promise became “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”

That retreat matters. A studio that bills by the hour does not move its pipeline onto alpha software, and none of the coverage suggests anyone has. On its own, Artcraft is a demo.

The fee that wrote the pitch

The problem for Adobe is what the demo points at. In March, Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement to resolve a Justice Department lawsuit, filed after a Federal Trade Commission investigation, over how it sold and cancelled Creative Cloud subscriptions. The case was brought under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act. The government alleged that the early termination fee on Adobe’s annual plan, paid monthly, was not disclosed clearly enough, and that cancelling involved needless steps and delays. Half the money is a civil penalty. The other half is free services for qualifying customers. The deal was filed as a proposed order that needs a court’s approval.

Adobe denies wrongdoing. “While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” the company said. Digital Camera World worked out that the settlement amounted to less than three days of Adobe’s quarterly revenue. The money was never the real cost. The real cost is that “cancellation fee” now travels with the brand, and a developer has turned that into a launch line.

Investors have been pricing the same fear from the other side. By June, Adobe’s stock was down 37% for the year and close to its 52-week low, as the market lumped it into the broader “SaaSpocalypse” sell-off in subscription software and weighed competition from generative AI. Shantanu Narayen, chief executive for 18 years, has said he will step down and remain as board chair. Artcraft does not move those numbers. It gives the narrative behind them a grievance with a GitHub page attached.

Built with the AI Adobe plugged into

The toolchain adds an awkward twist. In April, Adobe was among the launch partners when Anthropic introduced Claude for Creative Work, shipping a connector that lets Claude operate more than 50 tools across Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, InDesign and other apps. That connector assumes Claude works through Adobe’s software. Thomas used a model from the same company to rebuild the software itself.

The legal risk mostly falls on the clones, not on Adobe. As Ars Technica notes, reverse engineering has generally been treated as lawful, but an interface copied too closely can draw trade-dress claims, which cover a product’s look and feel. None of the coverage so far includes a response from Adobe.

The practical terms show where this is meant to go. The apps are free and process files locally, with no account required. iFun.de reports they are designed to be driven from the command line, through JSON and over MCP, the protocol AI agents use to operate software. Thomas, who says he has spent about a decade on large Rust projects and has coded only with AI since February, plans to pay for the work through token-based access to Artcraft’s own visual AI tools, which sit inside the apps.

The settlement requires Adobe to make cancelling easier. Artcraft is betting that once leaving is easy, people will need somewhere to go.

Tags: Anthropic, Adobe, Artcraft, open-source apps, Photoshop