Anthropic Cuts Windsurf's Access to Claude AI Models Amid OpenAI Acquisition Rumors

Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf: 'It would be odd for us to sell Claude to OpenAI' | TechCrunch

Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf's direct access to Anthropic's Claude AI models largely because of rumors and reports that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is acquiring the AI coding assistant. "We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future," said Kaplan during an onstage interview Thursday with TechCrunch at TC Sessions: AI 2025. "I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI," Kaplan said. The comment comes just a few weeks after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion. Earlier this week, Windsurf said that Anthropic cut its direct access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, two of the more popular AI models for coding, forcing the startup to find third-party computing providers on relatively short notice. Windsurf said it was disappointed in Anthropic's decision and that it might cause short-term instability for users trying to access Claude via Windsurf. Windsurf declined to comment on Kaplan's remarks, and an OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request. The companies have not confirmed the acquisition rumors. Part of the reason Anthropic cut Windsurf's access to Claude, according to Kaplan, is because the company is quite computing-constrained today. Anthropic would like to reserve its computing for what Kaplan characterized as "lasting partnerships." However, Kaplan said the company hopes to greatly increase the availability of models it can offer users and developers in the coming months. He added that Anthropic has just started to unlock capacity on a new computing cluster from its partner, Amazon, which he says is "really big and continues to scale." As Anthropic pulls away from Windsurf, Kaplan said he's collaborating with other customers building AI coding tools, such as Cursor -- a company Kaplan said Anthropic expects to work with for a long time. Kaplan rejected the idea that Anthropic was in competition with companies like Cursor, which is developing its own AI models. Meanwhile, Kaplan says Anthropic is increasingly focused on developing its own agentic coding products, such as Claude Code, rather than AI chatbot experiences. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are competing for the most popular AI chatbot platform, Kaplan said the chatbot paradigm was limiting due to its static nature, and that AI agents would in the long run be much more helpful for users.

Windsurf says Anthropic is limiting its direct access to Claude AI models | TechCrunch

Windsurf, the popular vibe coding startup that's reportedly being acquired by OpenAI, said Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to its Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI models. Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on X that Anthropic gave Windsurf little notice for this change, and the startup now has to find other third-party compute providers to run several of Anthropic's most popular AI models on its platform. "We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire - we wanted to pay them for the full capacity," said Mohan on X. "We are disappointed by this decision and short notice." In a blog post, Windsurf said it has some capacity with third-party inference providers, but not enough, so this change may create short-term availability issues for Windsurf users trying to access Claude. The decision comes just a few weeks after Anthropic seemed to pass over Windsurf during the launch of Claude 4, the company's new family of models, which offer industry leading performance on software engineering tasks. On launch day, Windsurf said it did not receive direct access from Anthropic to run Claude 4 on its platform, and still hasn't. This forced the company to rely on a workaround that's more expensive and complicated for developers to access Claude 4; a "bring your own key" solution that's now being applied to Claude 3.5 and Claude 3.7. Meanwhile, other popular AI coding tools -- including Anysphere's Cursor, Cognition's Devin, and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot -- seemed to have access to Claude 4 models at launch. The AI-assisted coding sector, also know as vibe coding, has heated up in recent months. OpenAI reportedly closed on a deal to acquire Windsurf in April. At the same time, Anthropic -- whose AI models are a favorite among developers -- has invested more in its own AI-coding applications. In February, Anthropic launched its own AI coding application, Claude Code, and in May, the startup held its first Code with Claude developer conference. "We're prioritizing capacity for sustainable partnerships that allow us to effectively serve the broader developer community," said Anthropic spokesperson Steve Mnich in an email to TechCrunch on Tuesday, noting that it's still possible to access Claude 4 on Windsurf via an API key. "Developers can also access Claude through our direct API integration, our partner ecosystem, and other development tools." Windsurf has grown quickly this year, reaching $100 million ARR in April, in an attempt to catch up with more popular AI coding tools such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot. However, Windsurf's limited access to Anthropic's models may be stunting its growth. Several Windsurf users that spoke with TechCrunch were frustrated by the lack of direct access to Anthropic's best AI coding models. Ronald Mannak, a startup founder that specializes in Apple's programming language, Swift, told TechCrunch that Claude 4 represented a significant jump in capabilities for his workloads. While Mannak has been a Windsurf customer since late 2024, he's switched to using Cursor in recent weeks so that he can vibe code more easily with Claude 4. As a short-term solution to support Claude 4, Windsurf allows users to connect their Anthropic API keys to their Windsurf accounts. However, developers have noted that this "bring your own key" solution is more expensive and complicated than if Windsurf provided the models itself. When it comes to vibe coders, optionality is the name of the game. Every few months, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic release new AI models that seem to outperform the industry on coding tasks. Because of that, it benefits vibe coding startups to support AI models from all the leading developers. Windsurf spokesperson Payal Patel tells TechCrunch via email that the company has always believed in providing optionality for users. In this case, it seems Anthropic has made that a bit more challenging.

Anthropic Extends Block for Windsurf, Ends First-Party Capacity | AIM

"We wanted to pay them for the full capacity. We are disappointed by this decision and the short notice." Anthropic has cut off first-party access to Claude 3.x models on the AI coding tool Windsurf, forcing the platform to limit usage and pivot to alternative methods with less than a week's notice. Windsurf, in a statement on Tuesday, said it lost nearly all direct Claude 3.x capacity, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet, and 3.7 Sonnet (thinking) after Anthropic's abrupt move. Some capacity remains via third-party inference providers, but not enough to meet existing demand. As a result, Claude 3.x access has been pulled from free and trial users, though it remains available via bring-your-own-key (BYOK). Claude Sonnet 4 is also accessible via the BYOK approach. To ease the transition, Windsurf has introduced a 0.75x promotional rate for Gemini 2.5 Pro. "Users may have some short-term capacity issues with the Claude 3.x models as the new capacity comes online, but we should be fine," the company further stated. Varun Mohan, founder of Windsurf, echoed the team's frustration in a post on X. "We wanted to pay them for the full capacity. We are disappointed by this decision and the short notice," he wrote, adding that alternative model capacity has ramped up rapidly and that Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4.1 and others remain unaffected. Windsurf, in the statement, emphasised its past commitment to maintaining Anthropic models as recommended options. They had explicitly communicated this priority to the Anthropic team. Moreover, Windsurf cautioned that this decision might have far-reaching consequences across the industry. Despite the setback, Windsurf stressed its value extends beyond model access, pointing to features like Previews, Deploys, and agentic integrations with JetBrains. "The magic is in the product," the company said. This comes right after Windsurf was not given direct access to the Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus 4 models after their release.