Recently, OpenAI has completed the acquisition of Windsurf, a popular atmosphere encoding startup. However, just as this news was announced, Windsurf faced an unexpected partnership "cliff" — AI giant Anthropic significantly reduced first-party access to the Claude3.7Sonnet and Claude3.5Sonnet models, with almost no prior notice.
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan publicly expressed on X that the team was "deeply disappointed" by this decision and emphasized their willingness to fully pay for the use of the Claude models. "This is an unexpected decision with insufficient communication," he added.
Due to the lack of stable model support, Windsurf users may currently face issues with the short-term unavailability of the Claude models. Although the company attempted to provide Claude access through third-party inference services and temporarily allowed users to bind their own API keys, this method is generally considered more costly and cumbersome by developers.
What has drawn even more attention is that since the release of the Claude4 series, Windsurf has not yet obtained direct permission to run these models on its platform. This means that platform users cannot seamlessly call the latest Anthropic model features like they do with Cursor, Devin, or GitHub Copilot. Some developers have therefore switched to other platforms; for example, entrepreneur Ronald Mannak, who focuses on Swift programming, switched to Cursor due to the Claude4 support issue.
Anthropic spokesperson Steve Mnich told TechCrunch that the company "prioritizes sustainable partnerships" and pointed out that developers can still access Claude via API keys. However, for Windsurf, which emphasizes simplicity in user experience, the "self-managed key" mode clearly lacks advantages.
In the increasingly competitive atmosphere encoding space, the breadth and flexibility of model access have become critical capabilities determining a platform's survival. Despite Windsurf's rapid growth, with its annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $100 million in April, its growth momentum may be affected by the restricted access to Claude4.
Windsurf spokesperson Payal Patel stated that the company remains committed to providing users with model choice freedom but admitted that this event presents new challenges to fulfilling that promise.