Dev Used Claude to Clone Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Free
Brandon Thomas built open-source lookalikes of Microsoft's core Office apps with Anthropic's Claude, and the results, while rough, show how cheap software cloning has become.
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Key takeaways
- Developer Brandon Thomas built free, open-source versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint using Anthropic's Claude.
- The clones are rough, not polished replacements for Microsoft Office.
- Thomas previously did the same trick with a Photoshop-style app.
- The bigger story is how little it now costs to copy established software.
One developer has used AI to rebuild the three pillars of Microsoft Office. Brandon Thomas relied on Anthropic's Claude to produce free, open-source replicas of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, according to Decrypt.
Rough, but that's not the point
Nobody's calling these polished. They're rough around the edges, and Office isn't going anywhere this week. But Thomas had already done something similar with Photoshop. So this isn't a one-off. It's a pattern.
The code is open source, which means anyone can take it, change it and build on top of it.
The real story: cloning got cheap
Office and Photoshop took decades and enormous teams to build. Now a single developer with an AI model can turn out a working imitation. That's the uncomfortable part for software companies whose main moat is the sheer effort it takes to build the product.
Why it matters
For crypto readers, this hits close to home. Open-source code has always been cheap to fork, and crypto projects have lived with copycats for years. AI pushes that further. If clones of complex apps take days instead of years, wallets, DeFi front ends and exchanges get easier to copy too. And that cuts both ways. Builders get a faster start. Scammers get an easier time spinning up convincing fakes. Expect code by itself to matter less, and brand, trust and security audits to matter more. So check what you're connecting your wallet to.
Source: Decrypt
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