A software developer in Atlanta has used AI to rebuild seven Adobe apps, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Illustrator among them, and released them free. Brandon Thomas's company, ArtCraft, put them online on the 30th of September and the 1st of October 2026, and he says he built them with Claude Opus 5.5, an AI model made by Anthropic. The Photoshop copy, PhotoCraft, has collected more than 60,000 stars on GitHub, the site where programmers share and rate code, in a little over two weeks.
Thomas says Adobe charged him its cancellation fee one time too many. Most people in that position write an angry review. He rebuilt Photoshop.
Free rivals to Photoshop are nothing new. GIMP, a free image editor, has been around since 1996, and Adobe still charges $69.99 a month in the United States for its bundle of creative apps. So we wanted to know what a grudge and an AI model had actually produced, and whether anyone at Adobe should be losing sleep over it.
He rebuilt Photoshop, Premiere Pro and five more, then gave them away
The seven are PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), PdfCraft (Acrobat), EffectCraft (After Effects) and DesignCraft (InDesign). All of them are free to download. They run on Mac and Windows, and on Linux too, which Adobe has never officially supported in all the years it has sold Photoshop. And the code is public, so anyone can copy or change it.
Thomas would like it known that he is no amateur leaning on AI. His announcement says he has 15 years in the industry, on payment systems and robotics. He says he built the apps with Claude Opus 5.5, the model Anthropic released in September, and that they contain none of Adobe's code.
That last claim matters, and here is how it is supposed to work. PhotoCraft's notes say it was written from public specifications, Adobe's own file-format document among them, and from watching how the real app behaves. Programmers call this a clean-room rebuild. You copy what the machine does without ever opening the machine.
A new head for the Mona Lisa in about a minute
A writer at the technology site Gizmodo tried PhotoCraft and had the head of Anthropic's chief executive on the Mona Lisa's shoulders in about a minute. That is the boss of the company whose AI helped build the thing, which seems only fair. Most commands were where Photoshop keeps them. Then a basic resizing tool started misbehaving, and he came away describing a glitchy but real Photoshop.
That is roughly where things stand. None of the seven are finished. ArtCraft's own download page lists PhotoCraft and PdfCraft as early alpha, which means early test versions, and the other five as still in development. PhotoCraft's project notes say it can't yet replace Photoshop for daily professional work. About twenty tools are missing, Photoshop plug-ins don't run, and by the 15th of October its GitHub page carried 1,787 open reports and proposed changes.
Thomas first said he would match Adobe within a month. He has since said that reaching 99% of Adobe's features will probably take months, and he told programmers on the forum Hacker News that the apps are not close to ready. Anyone who has ever been given a software deadline will recognise the journey.
Adobe has thousands of patents and hasn't said a word
The claim that no Adobe code was used is ArtCraft's own. Even if it holds, PhotoCraft copies Photoshop's layout and keyboard shortcuts closely, and Adobe owns thousands of patents. Adobe has not commented publicly.
The cancellation fee that started all this has already cost Adobe money. In March 2026 it agreed to a $150 million settlement of a United States government lawsuit that accused it of hiding its termination fees and making subscriptions hard to cancel. Adobe denied doing anything wrong.
Next on his list: Word, Excel and AutoCAD
Thomas has declared that "software is over", and he isn't waiting for anyone to agree. On the 7th of October, a week after the Adobe copies appeared, ArtCraft's GitHub page added five more projects, modelled on Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint, on the design program AutoCAD and on Pro Tools, the software recording studios use.
What a free Photoshop does to a $70-a-month price
Adobe is safe for now. Professional work depends on accurate colour, working plug-ins and software that doesn't fall over, and ArtCraft is a long way from offering them.
The price is another matter. A product like Photoshop has always been protected by how hard it was to build. Thomas set out to get even over a cancellation fee, and finished or not, his copies show how cheap that protection has become. Once a small company with an AI model can produce outlines of seven such products and give them away, a list of features stops being enough to justify $70 a month. The same goes for any software a business rents by the month.
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Key takeaways
- ArtCraft put free, open-source copies of seven Adobe apps online on the 30th of September and the 1st of October 2026, which Brandon Thomas says he built with Claude Opus 5.5. By its own download page two are early alpha and five are still in development.
- PhotoCraft, the Photoshop copy, collected more than 60,000 GitHub stars in a little over two weeks.
- On the 7th of October 2026 ArtCraft started projects modelled on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AutoCAD and Pro Tools.
- Adobe's Creative Cloud Pro costs $69.99 a month in the United States.
Frequently asked questions
Are the ArtCraft apps really free?
Yes. All seven are free to download and their code is open source, meaning anyone can read and reuse it. ArtCraft also sells plans from $8 a month, billed yearly, for credits to generate AI images and video.
Can PhotoCraft replace Photoshop?
Not yet. ArtCraft lists PhotoCraft as early alpha, and its project notes say it can't yet replace Photoshop for daily professional work. About twenty tools are missing and Photoshop plug-ins don't run.
Did ArtCraft use Adobe's code?
ArtCraft says it did not. PhotoCraft's notes say it was written from public specifications and from how the real app behaves. That claim is ArtCraft's own, and Adobe has not commented publicly.
Where can I download the ArtCraft apps?
From ArtCraft's site at getartcraft.com/apps, or as source code from github.com/storytold. None of the seven are finished: two are early test versions and five are still in development.