Software developers take note, Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan slams Anthropic over Claude access
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan has slammed Anthropic for allegedly cutting off Windsurf's first-party access to Claude 3.x models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet, and 3.7 Sonnet Thinking) with less than a week's notice forcing the company to make immediate adjustments for users, particularly those on the free tier. This is not a one-off incident.Mohan recently accused Anthropic of deliberately keeping Windsurf users from accessing the new Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 models on day one [May 22, 2025], unlike some competitors such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot.advertisementA little bit of context and reading between the lines is enough to state the obvious. Windsurf is a popular AI-native IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which is used by over a million developers globally - it was recently acquired by OpenAI, which is a competitor to Amazon-backed Anthropic. According to one far-fetched conspiracy theory on the internet, Anthropic may not want OpenAI collecting its data, both query and response, to seemingly train and improve its own AI. This could be a reason why it is taking these measures.
Through X (formerly Twitter) and a dedicated blog post, Mohan informed that while Windsurf has some capacity from other inference providers, it's currently insufficient to meet existing demand due to the short notice window from Anthropic and so, users may experience some capacity issues with Claude 3.x models. He reiterated that this was a 'short-term' issue.advertisementWindsurf is actively working to bring new capacity online, he said, while launching a promotional scheme for Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, offering it at 0.75x its original price while highlighting it as 'a strong alternative' for users during this period.Windsurf had implemented a "bring-your-own-key" (BYOK) system for Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 as a workaround for users to access these models through their own API keys from Anthropic. Now, it is extending this BYOK option to include the Claude 3.x models - while removing direct access for free users and those on Pro plan trials.Another theory why all this might be happening, is that, with OpenAI now owning Windsurf, there is an off chance that it would start to limit options to boost the use of its own AI. At the time of writing though, Mohan has emphasised Windsurf's commitment to providing the best product and access to all models - including Anthropic's.'We have been very clear to the Anthropic team that our priority was to keep the Anthropic models as recommended models and have been continuously willing to pay for the capacity,' he said, adding that 'We are concerned that Anthropic's conduct will harm many in the industry, not just Windsurf.'It will be interesting to see how things pan out in the future.
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