Ira Bodnar says Anthropic’s Claude AI made her startup ‘obsolete’: San Francisco founder reveals how one feature update ‘killed her startup’

AI is shaking up marketing and distribution. Tools like Claude and Manus might make basic campaign automation a commodity.

Recently, one update in the AI feature has nearly killed her startup. San Francisco entrepreneur Ira Bodnar might have lived every founder’s nightmare. Her startup, Ryze, had hundreds of paying clients and was growing fast. Then, seemingly overnight, a single update to Anthropic’s Claude made her product feel almost useless. Sales that once closed at 70% dropped to 20%. It seems one feature, one connector update, can disrupt months of hard work. Bodnar’s team had built an AI agent to manage advertising across Google and Meta.




Clients loved it, but Claude’s new capabilities, combined with Manus’ connectors, suddenly made that offering less special.

The story spread quickly online. Some commented they were curious to chat about selling to B2B clients. Others said they wanted to build tools that could outperform Claude or Manus. A few noted that the landscape for ad management was changing so fast that brand, taste, and storytelling might be the last remaining advantages.

San Francisco entrepreneur startup Ryze big drop after Claude

Ryze automated ad management. That meant you could give it access to all your Google and Meta accounts and let it run campaigns for you. Pretty neat, experts comment, and reportedly, businesses loved it. It saved time, cut mistakes, and made campaigns simpler. For a while, the startup felt unstoppable. Bodnar reportedly watched their growth charts spike and felt that rush founders know all too well. Then major update, Claude came, which dropped her sales by more than half.

It still can’t make changes in ad accounts. It only analyses data. No Google Ads access yet. But Bodnar warned that a few months down the line, it probably will. And if Claude or Manus gets full control, that might be a game-changer. One can almost see why Ryze felt obsolete overnight.

What is the plan for the future

Bodnar wrote that her team had anticipated shifts in the AI-ad space. Weeks before the big drop, they’d started pivoting. Now, Ryze helps huge ad agencies run complex workflows. Some clients reportedly manage 600 accounts with just six people, with crazy efficiency. The company has also integrated new analytics tools and custom dashboards, allowing teams to track campaigns in real time and adapt instantly. Bodnar’s startup might survive because it’s finding a niche that even AI can’t fully automate yet, giving them a unique edge in an otherwise crowded market.

Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6: New updated AI feature

Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, its latest and most powerful Sonnet model.

It is a full upgrade with better abilities in coding, handling computers, long-text understanding, planning tasks, research work, and design. The model also introduces a 1-million-token context window (beta), meaning it can remember and work with much larger amounts of information. Developers report that Sonnet 4.6 performs far better than Sonnet 4.5 and is sometimes even preferred over the more advanced Opus 4.5 model. Tasks that previously required a high-end model can now be done with Sonnet 4.6, especially office and coding work.

The update also improves computer-use abilities and maintains strong safety standards, with researchers describing the model as safe, honest, helpful, and reliable.



Quick tip: You can’t control the pace of AI development. You can only try to adapt. And Bodnar seems to be doing that.