According to reports, Windsurf, a popular Vibe encoding startup acquired by Openai, said Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to the popular AI models Claude 3.7 SONNET and Claude 3.5 sonnet.
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in an article on X that Anthropic has few notifications about this change, and now the startup has to find other third-party computing providers in order to run the Claude AI model on its platform.
"We are very clear about Anthropic, it's not our wish - we want to pay them in full. We are disappointed with this decision and the short notice," said Mohan on X.
Windsurf said in a blog post that this has some capabilities with third-party reasoning providers, but it is not enough, so this change could create short-term usability issues for Windsurf users trying to access Claude.
The decision comes after a few weeks of Windsurf rollout during the launch of the new model of human Claude 4 (Claude 4), which is a leading industry performance in software engineering tasks. Anthropic offers several popular Vibe encoding applications, including Anysphere's cursor, Cognition's Devin, and Microsoft's Github Copilot-instant access to Run Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4. These apps start supporting the new Claude 4 models on release date.
Windsurf said it did not access Claude 4 directly from Anthropic's platform at the time, but it still did not - forcing the company to rely on a more expensive and more complex solution for developers to access Claude. Anthropic's AI model has become a developer's favorite, and in the past, Anthropic has partnered with Windsurf to power its Vibe encoding tools.
In recent months, the AI-assisted coding department is also known as Vibe coding. Openai reportedly acquired a windsurfing agreement in April. Meanwhile, Anthropic has invested more in its own AI-encoding applications. In February, Anthropic launched its own AI-encoding app, Claude Code, and in May, the startup held its first code at the Claude Developer Conference.
"Our ability to prioritize sustainable partnerships allows us to effectively serve the broader developer community," said Steve Mnich, anthropomorphic spokesman, in an email to TechCrunch on Tuesday. "Developers can also access Claude through our direct API integration, our partner ecosystem and other development tools."
Windsurf has grown rapidly this year, reaching $100 million in ARR in April, trying to catch up with more popular AI coding tools like Cursor and Github Copilot. However, limited access to human models by winding and twisting may hinder its growth.
Several windsurfing users who spoke with TechCrunch were frustrated by the lack of direct access to the best AI-encoded models of humans.
Ronald Mannak, founder of the startup specializing in Apple's programming languages, told TechCrunch that Claude 4 represents a significant increase in his workload capacity. Mannak has been a Wind Pulse client since late 2024, but he has switched to using the cursor in recent weeks so he can use the Claude 4 more easily to interact.
As a short-term solution that supports Claude 4, Windsurf allows users to connect their anthropomorphic API keys to their windsurfing accounts. However, the developers point out that this "bring your own key" solution is more expensive and complex than Windsurf provides the model itself.
Selectivity is the name of the game when it comes to atmosphere encoder. Every few months, the new AI models in OpenAI, Google and Anthropic versions all seem to outperform the coding tasks of the entire industry. So it benefits Vibe coding startups from AI models of all leading developers.
Windsurf spokesman Payal Patel told TechCrunch via email that the company has always believed to provide options for users. In this case, anthropomorphism seems to make it more challenging.