Artcraft Clones Adobe's Creative Suite With AI-Built Open Apps

Artcraft, a company that began last year as a "controllable AI for artists," released seven open source applications over the weekend of October 4-5, 2026, built to recreate the interfaces and tools of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, according to Ars Technica.

What exactly did Artcraft release?

The lineup covers seven apps spanning Adobe's core Creative Cloud categories, from photo editing to video to PDF tools. The apps are written in Rust, with WebAssembly versions for browser use, and released under MIT/Apache licenses, Ars Technica reported. One of the clones, Filmcraft, is described in the Ars Technica piece as closely mimicking "the look and feel of Adobe Premiere."

How did developer Brandon Thomas build the clones?

Software developer Brandon Thomas announced the apps on Reddit, saying he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create what he called "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software, per Ars Technica. Thomas, who says he has roughly a decade of experience on large-scale Rust projects, told Hacker News he was motivated in part by being "bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times."

How finished is the software right now?

Ars Technica describes the current release as "super early alpha," and commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere "have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings." Thomas's own timeline for closing that gap has already shifted. On Reddit he first stated, "We're going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month." Days later on Hacker News, he revised that: "99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years."

How will Artcraft pay for ongoing development?

Thomas wrote that the free apps will be funded by selling token-based access to Artcraft's existing visual AI model and IDE, which appears inside the apps as one imagery-generation option alongside third-party models, according to Ars Technica. He argued the revenue stream means the project won't become "some orphaned small-team project," adding, "We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded."

Is AI-assisted reverse engineering of software legal?

Reverse engineering — replicating a program's functionality without copying its underlying code — has a long history in software development and has "generally been found legally acceptable," Ars Technica notes, citing prior practice in the industry. Thomas's project extends that practice by using an AI model, Claude Opus 5.5, to accelerate the process of matching Adobe's interfaces and features rather than relying solely on manual coding.

By the numbers

• Seven open source apps released, covering Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro equivalents
• Thomas's public parity estimates moved from "100% within a month" to "99% ... months, not years" in the span of days

For now, the apps remain a work in progress rather than a drop-in Creative Cloud replacement, and Thomas's own revised timeline suggests full feature parity is not imminent, per his Hacker News comments cited by Ars Technica.