Looking at Ableton 11's feature set it seems they're running out of ideas; CLAP support would definitely be the kinda thing that could compel people to upgrade to a future version.
It being MIT licensed also gives it a much better chance of getting integrated into all sorts of smaller DAWs and cheaper ones too that might not have wanted to deal with all the nonsense that comes with VST.
>Looking at Ableton 11's feature set it seems they're running out of ideas
Ableton adds pragmatic stuff. They have tons they could add without running out of ideas for those for 50 years. A new format is not one of those (and will have small workflow impact on users anyway).
Examples: ARA support (somebody already mentioned), melodyne/flex/style vocal correction, soft track re-arragement (versions), and 50 other things besides...
Ableton is just slow at developing Live. I wonder what are the reasons behind this, perhaps they want to make sure they don't stray away from the core vision (which is what made it popular) or perhaps it's stability. Or perhaps everyone is just too busy working on their own music.
They can't even add ARA2 when every other major DAW has had it for years. Something is deeply wrong with Ableton, either they have trash product managers, SWE, or the 20+ year old codebase is too fragile. For example, why can't I have more than 7 collection folders?
Live 11 is becoming more of a cpu hog to my iMac Pro with each M1 update. It crashes the most often of all my DAW software. That said while I could go back to Logic or Cubase I still get 10x more music done with live vs the others. I remember about 10-12 years ago live version 7 or 8 was way behind schedule so much so that the CEO/Owner made a statement about it. This is all from memory though so some details may be wrong. I say that to say that is suspect that the code base is probably more fragile than the others.
I've been using Live for 15 years. The workflow is better in some ways—or at least it's extremely familiar—but I recently forced myself to learn Reaper. My mind is painstakingly slow to adjust, but Reaper's features make Ableton feel outrageously archaic. If I'm being honest with myself, I'll need another year or two to match my productivity with Live, but the bandaid had to be ripped off at some point, and I'm glad I did.
Note that Bitwig does not have ARA2 support either. Bitwig was developed by some folks who left Ableton to push in directions that Ableton did not want to go.
So ... consider the possibility that the fundamental data models in both Live and Bitwig make it hard to support ARA2, in an inverse of the way that Live (and later Bitwig) had clip launching for 16 years before any other DAW.
It being MIT licensed also gives it a much better chance of getting integrated into all sorts of smaller DAWs and cheaper ones too that might not have wanted to deal with all the nonsense that comes with VST.