Anthropic Cuts Windsurf off from Claude 4 after OpenAI Deal Rumor
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We have drama in the AI world. Windsurf, which is a very large coding company, notable because it's allegedly in talks right now to be acquired by OpenAI, says that Anthropic, now I guess a competitor, is limiting its access to essentially put Claude

and the new Cloud 4 model into it for its developers to use for code. This is a really big deal because Cloud 4 is the best code model. Anthropic always makes the best model. It's the most popular model with developers. And if they're not allowing this company, Windsurf, to use it, this is a potentially kneecapping experience for this company as far as it's gross with developers. People are just going to stop using it. So there's a lot of drama. There's a lot of why.

Anthropic has responded. Their accusations are flying and the plot is getting a lot thicker. So I'm going to be diving into all of that today on the podcast. Before I do, if you want to try out the latest versions of Claude or the latest versions of any AI model, my product AI box and our new playground has launched officially. We have a beta out right now. And if you want access to the top 40 AI models, not just text, but also image,

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into what's going on with windsurf.

So this all started with a tweet from the CEO Varun Mohan. He said, this is pretty crazy. He says, with less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first party capacity to all Claude 3.X, so anything above three models. Given the short notice, we may see some short-term Claude 3.X model availability issues as we have very quickly ramped up capacity on other inference. So

The thing that's interesting here is because of the way the market works, they're actually not completely cut off from Claude. They have a bit of a falling out and I'm going to get into the falling out here. But what's interesting is there's third party vendors that they're actually using. So they're actually able to still get access and they have a way to get developers direct access. It's a little bit trickier, but I'll go over that. I'll get into the rest of what he said.

He said,

What's going on here? Okay, one last juicy thing on this. Logan Kilpatrick, who is over at Google, working with Google Gemini, commented on this and said, he just said, Gemini and then the handshake emoji windsurf. Like, don't worry, Gemini is not going to stop supporting you. We got your back. What's going on here? Why did this happen? It seems like essentially Anthropic came and cut off access to Anthropic for windsurf, which is huge. Windsurf is the second biggest...

AI coding tool, I think after cursor and maybe GitHub co-pilot somewhere in there. So maybe it's the third biggest after that. But the one that most like developers are using, I hear of our cursor. And then I think windsurf is the next one. That's why I think opening eyes is, you know, looking to look into acquire and talks to acquire. So,

Essentially what happened was, I believe, and this isn't going to be the official story you'll hear anywhere, but I believe that because OpenAI is in the process of acquiring Windsurf, once they do that, they're probably going to try to set the default AI model to WinSurf.

something from OpenAI anyways, and they'll probably offer others, I would hope. I mean, if they don't, then it probably will just kill it anyways. I hope they'll offer other models, but they're probably going to set the default to themselves. They know that this is going to be a tricky relationship. They're essentially going to be helping a direct competitor. But at the end of the day, in my opinion, I say, why not? Why not take money from OpenAI? Like if OpenAI is really going to be

buying this company and spending credits on your platform, why wouldn't you sell it? But apparently they don't want to do that. And the reason that they have outlined...

for that is this is a direct response to this whole situation that an anthropic spokesperson, Steve Munch said, he said, we're prioritizing capacity of sustainable partnerships that allow us to effectively serve the broader developer community. So evidently windsurf is no longer a sustainable partnership because they're going to be going and being owned by a competitor. To me, that's,

crazy. But what they did say, and this is, you know, this is still possible. They said developers can also access Claude through our direct API integration, our partner ecosystem and other development tools. So they're like,

look, if you guys really want Claude that bad and you can't get it over at Windsurf, just go use some other developer tools. Cough, cough, our own Claude code, which I'm not going to lie over at my company, AI box. We exclusively use Claude code and we use it heavily. I think it's, you know, we're spending a hundred dollars in credits every day.

couple days, I think, right at this point per developer. So we're using it very heavily. We're absolutely blown away by the amount of work and code that we're able to generate and the amount of work we're able to get done with it. So it's really good. And Cloud Code is cool because it plugs into your whole database. Sorry, not your whole database, your whole code base, front end and back end. It can tie everything together. It can work between the two, talk between the two, do some really insane, impressive things. So it's great.

is this kind of anti-competitive cutting off your big competitor? Maybe, I don't know. It doesn't seem very, very cool, especially like, I think a lot of people would be like, Oh, it's fine. Wind surf's getting bought by opening eyes. So it's just a competitive thing to opening eye, but it's not really because maybe opening hasn't bought them yet, or maybe the deal is going to fall through. So at the end of the day, they're still kind of shafting. And maybe if opening, I bought it, they could do that. But right now they're still shafting wind surf. Like this is, uh,

you know, a company that trusted them. It's some developers that trusted them with their model and bringing it on. So I don't know. I don't feel like it's a very, very nice move. That being said, Windsurf is growing really quickly. They've reached over $100 million in annual recurring revenue just in April.

So they're getting close to catching up to cursor, they're getting close to catching up to GitHub co-pilot. But this I really do think is going to limit their growth. Like I mentioned, Cloud Code is the only platform I use and I know a lot of developers, that's the only platforms they are using as well. So...

Yes, you can go bring your own API key and I think plug it into Windsurf. So you can go get an Anthropic API key, plug it into Windsurf and still have access to it. It's technically through your account and not Windsurf's account. This is definitely, apparently this is more expensive. This is what some people are saying. I'm not 100% sure. I haven't verified that. Some people are saying that that's still more expensive. And if that's the case, then of course, why would you do that when you can go use it less expensive, perhaps somewhere else like Cursor? Yeah.

But either way, not a cool move. I think this is pretty rough for windsurf. A lot of developers only use that. And so they literally will just go switch over to cursor or another platform and use that instead. So very, very crazy to see what's going on. A lot of drama in the AI world.

I will keep you up to date on everything going on. If you enjoyed this episode, if you learned anything new about AI code and all of the drama in the industry, make sure to leave a rating and review on the podcast and make sure to go check out AI box.ai. If you want a platform where you can access.

Claude, all the latest models of OpenAI, all the latest, you know, the 20 biggest AI companies and all of the different models for 20 bucks a month. You're going to get access to all of it, including image generation and audio generation, by the way. All that's in there, AIbox.ai. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.