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

Summary

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. Meanwhile, other popular AI coding tools — including Anysphere’s Cursor, Cognition’s Devin, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot — seemed to have direct 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 al...