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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
I'm sure this all fits neatly into their EA "maximizing positive outcomes for humanity" world-view somehow.
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.
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.
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>"
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.
Antitrust?
Maybe GitHub and Microsoft should kick out all competing company 3rd party integrations.
See where this leads...
This should be a clear signal to the community that anthropic can’t be trusted. OpenAI can’t either, TBD on google
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.