Windsurf, a popular atmosphere coding startup reportedly being acquired by Openai, says that humanity has significantly reduced first-party access to the Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI models.
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on Tuesday in X that humanity has little notice of the change, with startups having to find other third-party computing providers and run some of humanity’s most popular AI models on its platform.
“We’ve been artificially very clear that this is not our desire. We wanted to pay them for their full potential,” Mohan said in X. “I am disappointed with this decision and the short notice.”
In a blog post, Windsurf said that the change could cause short-term availability issues for Windsurf users trying to access Claude, as third-party inference providers have some capacity but not sufficient.
The decision comes just weeks after humanity appears to be surpassing Windsurf during the launch of the Claude 4, the company’s new family of models that deliver industry-leading performance in software engineering tasks.
On the release date, Windsurf said it was not directly accessible to humanity to run Claude 4 on its platform. This forced the company to rely on more expensive and complicated workarounds for developers to access Claude 4. Meanwhile, other popular AI coding tools like Anysphere’s cursor, Cognition’s Devin, and Microsoft’s Github Copilot appeared to have direct access to the Claude 4 model at launch.
The AI-assisted coding sector, also known as atmospheric coding, has been getting hot in recent months. Openai reportedly signed an agreement to acquire Windsurf in April. At the same time, humanity, whose AI models are favorite among developers, is investing more in its own AI coding applications. In February, Anthropic launched its own AI coding application, Claude Code, and in May, Startup held its first code at the Claude Developer Conference.
“We prioritize the ability to provide sustainable partnerships to effectively serve the broader developer community,” Humanity spokesman Steve Mnich said in an email to TechCrunch on Tuesday. “Developers can also access Claude through direct API integration, the partner ecosystem, and other development tools.”
Windsurf has grown rapidly this year, reaching $100 million in April, growing to catch up with more popular AI coding tools like Cursor and Github Copilot. However, limited access to Windsurf’s Anthropic model may be hampering its growth.
Some Windsurf users who spoke to TechCrunch were unhappy with the lack of direct access to humanity’s best AI coding models.
Ronald Mannak, the founder of a startup specializing in Apple’s programming language Swift, told TechCrunch that Claude 4 represents a key jump in the capabilities of his workload. Mannak has been a Windsurf customer since late 2024, but has switched to using Cursor in recent weeks, making it easier to supply code with Claude 4.
As a short-term solution supporting Claude 4, Windsurf allows users to connect humanity’s API keys to their Windsurf accounts. However, developers point out that this “bringing your own key” solution is more expensive and complicated than Windsurf provided the model itself.
As for Vibe Coders, the option is the name of the game. Every few months, Openai, Google and Human releases release new AI models that are likely to outperform the industry in coding tasks. So it benefits vibe coding startups to support AI models from all major developers.
Windsurf spokesperson Payal Patel told TechCrunch in an email that the company has always believed in providing options to its users. In this case, it seems that humanity has made it a little more challenging.
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