Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer of humanity, said his company is acquiring its biggest competitor, Openai, to its AI coding assistant, with direct access to Windsurf’s human Claude AI model, primarily due to rumors and reporting.
“We are really trying to enable us to work with us sustainably in the future,” Kaplan said in an on-stage interview with TechCrunch at TC Session: AI 2025.
“I think it’s strange that we’re selling Claude openly,” Kaplan said.
The comment comes weeks after Bloomberg reported that Openai had acquired Windsurf for $3 billion. Earlier this week, Windsurf said that humanity had reduced direct access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Windsurf said it was disappointed with the human decisions and could cause short-term instability for users trying to access Claude via Windsurf.
Windsurf declined to comment on Kaplan’s remarks, and Openai spokesman did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request. The company has not confirmed rumors of the acquisition.
According to Kaplan, part of the reason why humanity cut off access to Windsurf’s Claude is because the company is so computing-restricted today. Humanity wants to book computing for what Kaplan has characterized as a “permanent partnership.”
However, Kaplan said the company hopes to significantly improve the availability of the models it can offer to users and developers in the coming months. He added that humanity is just beginning to unlock capacity of new computing clusters from its partner Amazon.
As humanity is pulled away from the windsurf, Kaplan said he is working with other customers who are building AI coding tools such as cursors. Kaplan said he expects humanity to work for a long time. Kaplan rejected the idea that humanity is competing with companies like Cursor, who are developing their own AI models.
Meanwhile, Kaplan says that humanity is increasingly focused on developing its own agent coding products such as Claude Code, rather than AI chatbot experiences. Companies like Openai, Google and Meta are competing for the most popular AI chatbot platforms, but Kaplan said the chatbot paradigm is limited due to its static nature, and AI agents are much more useful for users in the long run.
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