Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/anthropic-co-founder-on-cutting-access-to-windsurf-it-would-be-odd-for-us-to-sell-claude-to-openai/

by jawns • 1 year ago

114 107 1 year ago

techcrunch.com

nickthegreek• 1 year ago

Now your company needs to worry about building workflows on the back of these neat AI companies, they got bought out and cause a disruption that can reverberate through the org in unknown ways for unknown amounts of time. This and the openai no deletion court order should be a wake up call on how these technologies get implemented and the trust we cede to them.

sebmellen• 1 year ago

It’s no different from the shell games that have been going on in enterprise software for the past 30 years.

You can choose independence if you’re willing to use a slightly worse open weight model.

icelancer• 1 year ago

This seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't really understand why Windsurf, owned by OpenAI (allegedly), should expect to have API access to their main competitor's API. People can still bring their own key and use whatever models they want in that way.

BoorishBears2• 1 year ago

It doesn't make sense and the co-founder is being an intentionally crappy communicator.

He's trying to paint it as removing access to something everyone gets by default, but in reality it's removing special treatment that they were previously giving Windsurf.

The default Anthropic rate limit tiers don't support something Windsurf sized, and right now getting increased rate limits outside of their predefined tiers is an uphill battle because of how badly they're compute constrained.

consumer451• 1 year ago

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.

As a Windsurf user, maybe Sonnet 3.x models are slower right now, but they don't require BYOK like 4 does. So this is a bit of an exaggeration, isn't it? Anthropic did not cut them off, they seem to have continued honoring existing quota on previous agreements.

What did Windsurf think was going to happen with this particular exit? Also, how embarrassing is this for OpenAI that it's even a big deal?

tuyguntn3• 1 year ago

This seems odd to me, I don't expect bakery to reject selling me a bread this morning, because I started working in another bakery nearby.

charlie02• 1 year ago

No, but if YOU opened up a bakery and were packing their bread and re-selling it, they might not like that. This happened before and it's not great.

https://www.businessinsider.com/restaurant-accused-reselling...

freehorse3• 1 year ago

This is more like about cutting you off reselling their bread, which would be reasonable.

hiddencost2• 1 year ago

IDK, I pay someone money for a service, I would like the terms of our contract to protect me from getting cut off capriciously. The fact that Anthropic is selling a service without providing a contract that provides consumers with protections kinda sucks?

hiddencost2• 1 year ago

Also, like, anti competitive behavior is kinda ... Illegal?

princealiiiii• 1 year ago

Any app built on top of these model providers could become a competitor to these providers. Since the model providers are currently in the lowest-margin part of the business, it is likely they will try to expand in to the app layer and start pulling the rug from under these businesses built on top of them.

Amazon had a similar tactic, where it would use other sellers on its marketplace to validate market demand for products, and then produce its own cheap copies of the successes.

liuliu• 1 year ago

Or AWS, and AWS managed services v.s. other managed services on top of AWS.

jsnell6• 1 year ago

The model providers are not in the low margin part of the business. The unit economies of paid-per-token APIs are clearly favorable, and scale amazingly well as long as you can procure enough compute.

I think it's the subscription-based models that are tricky to make work in the long term, since they suffer from adverse selection. Only the heaviest users will pay for a subscription, and those are the users that you either lose money on or make unhappy with strict usage limits. It's kind of the inverse of the gym membership model.

Honestly, I think the subscriptions are mainly used as a demand moderation method for advanced features.

raincole• 1 year ago

The model providers are not in the low margin part of the business.

Many people believe that model providers are running at negative margin.

(I don't know how true it is.)

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

What evidence do you have that there's decent margin on the APIs?

tonyhart72• 1 year ago

subscription model is just there to serve B2C side of business which in turn them into B2B side

antrophic said themselves that enterprise is where the money at, but you cant just serve enterprise on the get go right

this is where the B2C indirect influence comes

brookst5• 1 year ago

Citation needed.

Model providers spend a ton of money. It is unclear if they will ever have high margins. Today they are somewhere between zero and negative big numbers.

hshdhdhj4444• 1 year ago

Even to the extent that’s true, that doesn’t seem to be the issue here.

OpenAI is acquiring Windsurf which is its most direct competitor.

selcuka6• 1 year ago

True. Otherwise Anthropic would cut access to other code assistants too as they all compete with Claude Code.

brookst5• 1 year ago

I 100% agree with you except your framing makes it sound like the model providers are doing something wrong.

If I spend a ton of money money making the most amazing ceramic dinner plates ever and sell them to distributors for $10 each, and one distributor strikes gold in a market selling them at $100/plate, despite adding no value beyond distribution… hell yeah I’m cutting them off and selling direct.

I don’t really understand how it’s possible to see that in moral terms, let alone with the low-value partner somehow a victim.

pbh1012• 1 year ago

I don’t think it is at all clear that Windsurf adds zero value. Why do you think this is a helpful analogy?

widdakay• 1 year ago

These are two different products. It's like SpaceX launching satellites for competitive satellite internet services. They didn't care that they were providing launch capabilities for a competitor and neither should Anthropic. What if Apple stopped allowing you to use an iPhone if you worked at Google?

thrdbndndn• 1 year ago

I think the nature of your two examples, along with the one from the news, is too different from each other for the analogy to really hold. These situations can only be judged on a case-by-case basis.

tonyhart72• 1 year ago

"They didn't care that they were providing launch capabilities for a competitor"

Yeah because another internet provider did not have SpaceX reusable rocket technology

its not really quite the same you know

killerstorm• 1 year ago

Do you understand that data can be used for training?

paxys2• 1 year ago

If SpaceX was launching every rocket at a loss then they would absolutely care about a competitor taking advantage of it.

demosthanos3• 1 year ago

What if Apple stopped allowing you to use an iPhone if you worked at Google?

This wouldn't be remotely comparable. This is targeting of a competitor's employees, not targeting a competitor's subsidiaries.

If you want to go the Apple-Google route a better comparison would be that this is like Apple refusing to allow you to hook up an Air Tag on an Android phone. Which is something that they do, in fact, do.

danpalmer• 1 year ago

Another way this isn't comparable is that the training data is critical for the services each provides. Seeing answers Claude gives (at scale, for free) would be a huge competitive advantage to OpenAI, whereas Apple Mail seeing the email you send via Gmail wouldn't convey any competitive advantage in email, for example.

dboreham• 1 year ago

Probably most here are not old enough to remember, but there was a time when Google had all sorts of data access APIs and encouraged developers to create applications that used said APIs. And then they disabled them all.

bitpush• 1 year ago

How is that relevant?

8note• 1 year ago

api openness is temporary - dont build a business on it

pton_xd• 1 year ago

I'm sure this all fits neatly into their EA "maximizing positive outcomes for humanity" world-view somehow.

CyberMacGyver• 1 year ago

It could be argued from Antrhopics perspective that OpenAI and Worldcoin are not positive for humanity so this in fact necessary

dmix2• 1 year ago

I don't think EA people are pro going out of business so you don't have money.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Can't save humanity from the heat death of the universe without a castle.

tuyguntn3• 1 year ago

I don't know what kind of agreement they had, or any agreement at all, but with this move, Anthropic is showing itself as an unreliable provider.

It's same as: We can cut access anytime, "I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to <YOUR_COMPANY>"

charlie02• 1 year ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/restaurant-accused-reselling...

mountainriver2• 1 year ago

This should be a clear signal to the community that anthropic can’t be trusted. OpenAI can’t either, TBD on google

alehlopeh• 1 year ago

TBD on whether Google can be trusted? That ship sailed long ago.

mountainriver2• 1 year ago

To steal markets? Honestly I can’t think of one but someone can correct me

I certainly don’t trust them to not kill whole products on demand

k__• 1 year ago

When I read about Cursor and Windsurf, I'm quite happy that I only use Aider. An open source project, not associated with anyone else...

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Curser and Windserf

Yeah better to go with open technologies. Maybe use Groq for inference knowing you can switch over later if needed as you are using Llama or Deepseek.

wincy• 1 year ago

Wow excited for when Anthropic buys Cursor in a couple months and I get locked out of using OpenAI models with it. This is depressing. I just want stuff to work.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 year ago

This is why I use Aider. Open source or GTFO

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

And then Anthropic cuts api access to Aider

deadbabe• 1 year ago

Aren’t the OpenAI models worse than the alternatives?

dmix2• 1 year ago

The difference is likely very marginal in practice for what most people are doing. o3 and 4o do programming just fine.

jerpint• 1 year ago

That may be true today but not in a few weeks, ideally you have access to all models whenever

selcuka6• 1 year ago

Anthropic models are slightly better for coding tasks anyway. I believe Windsurf is in more trouble.

brookst5• 1 year ago

Friendly advice: you will be happier if you defer reacting to things until they are actually real.

We can all imagine all sorts or terrible futures. Many of us do. But there is no upside in being prematurely outraged.

paxys2• 1 year ago

If LLMs were a sustainable business then Anthropic would have no problem selling Claude to a competitor. Heck they'd brag about it ("see OpenAI uses our models to code instead of their own!"). You see this in the industry all the time. Large tech companies compete with each other and sue each other and have deep business relationships at the same time.

What this change really says is that Anthropic doesn't want to burn VC money to help a competitor. And that is the reality of "I just want stuff to work". It won't just work because there's no stable business underneath it. Until that business can be found things will keep changing and get shittier.

demosthanos3• 1 year ago

Does anyone here actually use OpenAI models in Cursor? I kind of forgot they were even there. I've just been alternating between Claude and Gemini, and the sense I've had in online discussions is that that's pretty normal.

346794• 1 year ago

Void is basically the same thing, but open source and better. It's easy to use with any provider API key, even LM Studio for local models. You can use it with free models available from OpenRouter to try it out, but the quality of output is just as dependent on the model as any other solution.

https://voideditor.com/

https://github.com/voideditor/void

zwarag• 1 year ago

People like Windsurf and Cursor because they offer them a flatrate.

lightbulbish• 1 year ago

Have you used it? Haven't heard about it but tbh I can see how it would eventually outperform cursor and/or windsurf. As LLMS get better, and more background tasks etc, will come, I don't see a sustainably moat around IDEs generally (except switching cost, but if it is mostly vs code... )

saw you did below. What is your experience so far? fast requests are great. Anything big lacking?

I was using roo code for a bit and it was cool to see how fast it was going compared to windsurf.

solumunus• 1 year ago

Why would they when Claude Code is night and day better? It makes Cursor look like a joke in my experience.

discohead• 1 year ago

How Cursor is building the future of AI coding with Claude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGgsoIgbT_Y

HyprMusic2• 1 year ago

This feels like a cheap trick to drive users towards Claude Code. It's likely no coincidence that this happened at the same time they announced subscription access to Claude Code.

The Windsurf team repeatedly stated that they're running at a loss so all this seems to have achieved is giving OpenAI an excuse to cut their 3rd party costs and drive more Windsurf users towards their own models.

ramesh312• 1 year ago

Nobody is actually using Windsurf. It was an acquihire and a squashing of competition that caught ground in the enterprise contract market really early. Anyone doing agentic coding seriously is using open source tooling with direct token pricing to the major model providers. Windsurf/Cursor/et. al are just expensive middlemen with no added value.

peterhadlaw2• 1 year ago

Which open source agentic tooling are you using. I'm a fan of Aider but I find it lacking the agentic side of things. I've looked at Goose, Plandex, Opencode, and etc. Which do you like?

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

If nobody is using then why cut off access?

artdigital2• 1 year ago

This feels like a cheap trick to drive users towards Claude Code

How did you come to this conclusion? It’s very much like he remarked: OpenAI acquired Windsurf, OpenAI is Anthropics direct competitor.

It doesn’t make strategic sense to sell Claude to OpenAI. OpenAI could train against Claude weights, or OpenAI can cut out Anthropic at any moment to push their own models.

The partnership isn’t long lasting so it doesn’t make sense to continue it.

selcuka6• 1 year ago

OpenAI could train against Claude weights

OpenAI can always buy a Claude API subscription with a credit card if they want to train something. This change only prevents the Windsurf product from offering Claude APIs to their customers.

huxley• 1 year ago

Totally irrelevant, Anthropic isn’t cutting off OpenAI, it is cutting off Windsurf users.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Antitrust?

Maybe GitHub and Microsoft should kick out all competing company 3rd party integrations.

See where this leads...

arnaudsm• 1 year ago

We are about to enter the era of aggressive LLM monetisation and anti-competitivness. We got used to cheap subsidized models, in bet in 2 years we'll pay double for the same service.

jmward01• 1 year ago

Decisions like this may shoot them in the foot later as opensource and cheaper compute continues to push into frontier model territory. I know I have no loyalty to the big providers and would take a minor quality/cost hit to jump off. Right now it isn't a minor quality / cost hit though. Knowing that they can cut you off if they think you are going to end up competing with them makes me tolerate an even bigger gap.

Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf

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