Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan mentioned his firm reduce Windsurf’s direct entry to Anthropic’s Claude AI fashions largely due to rumors and reviews that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is buying the AI coding assistant.
“We actually are simply making an attempt to allow our prospects who’re going to sustainably be working with us sooner or later,” mentioned Kaplan throughout an onstage interview Thursday with TechCrunch at TC Classes: AI 2025.
“I believe it could be odd for us to be promoting Claude to OpenAI,” Kaplan mentioned.
The remark comes just some weeks after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was buying Windsurf for $3 billion. Earlier this week, Windsurf mentioned that Anthropic reduce its direct entry to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, two of the extra in style AI fashions for coding, forcing the startup to seek out third-party computing suppliers on comparatively brief discover. Windsurf mentioned it was disenchanted in Anthropic’s choice and that it’d trigger short-term instability for customers making an attempt to entry Claude through Windsurf.
Windsurf declined to touch upon Kaplan’s remarks, and an OpenAI spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request. The businesses haven’t confirmed the acquisition rumors.
A part of the explanation Anthropic reduce Windsurf’s entry to Claude, in accordance with Kaplan, is as a result of the corporate is kind of computing-constrained as we speak. Anthropic want to reserve its computing for what Kaplan characterised as “lasting partnerships.”
Nevertheless, Kaplan mentioned the corporate hopes to significantly improve the provision of fashions it might probably supply customers and builders within the coming months. He added that Anthropic has simply began to unlock capability on a brand new computing cluster from its accomplice, Amazon, which he says is “actually massive and continues to scale.”
As Anthropic pulls away from Windsurf, Kaplan mentioned he’s collaborating with different prospects constructing AI coding instruments, similar to Cursor — an organization Kaplan mentioned Anthropic expects to work with for a very long time. Kaplan rejected the concept that Anthropic was in competitors with firms like Cursor, which is creating its personal AI fashions.
In the meantime, Kaplan says Anthropic is more and more centered on creating its personal agentic coding merchandise, similar to Claude Code, reasonably than AI chatbot experiences. Whereas firms like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are competing for the preferred AI chatbot platform, Kaplan mentioned the chatbot paradigm was limiting on account of its static nature, and that AI brokers would in the long term be way more useful for customers.
