As AI has become more mainstream, turf wars between rival players seem to be breaking out.
Anthropic has cut off access to its Claude series of models from coding IDE Windsurf. This follows reports that Anthropic’s rival OpenAI had agreed to buy Windsurf. It appears that following this announcement, Anthropic isn’t keen on its models being available on an OpenAI-owned product.
“With less than a week of notice, Anthropic informed us they were cutting off nearly all of our first-party capacity to the Claude 3.x models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet, and 3.7 Sonnet Thinking),” Windsurf wrote in a blogpost. “We do have some capacity from other inference providers, but not enough today, given the length of notice, to support all of the existing demand for these models,” it added.
Windsurf said that as a result, it was removing direct access to Claude 3.x models to Free tier users (or trials of the Pro plan). The company said that it would look at third party providers to continue giving its paid users access to Anthropic’s models, and users with their own model key would still be able to use Claude on Windsurf. “Users may have some short-term capacity issues with the Claude 3.x models as the new capacity comes online, but we should be fine. We will launch a promo rate for Gemini 2.5 Pro of 0.75x (originally 1x) as it is a strong alternative within Windsurf to help with this period,” the company said.
Last month, it had been reported that OpenAI had agreed to buy Windsurf for $4 billion. The deal hasn’t been confirmed by the two companies, but it appears that the deal has indeed gone through, which has made Anthropic pull access from its product. Anthropic has its own coding products like Claude Code, and likely doesn’t want its models to be used by a competitor. Also, Windsurf’s partnership with OpenAI would give OpenAI access to valuable customer data on how users were using Anthropic’s popular coding models, which could help OpenAI build their own.
And it’s likely that such moves between rivals in the AI race will only accelerate. The top AI model companies aren’t only building AI models, but are also looking to build products on top of them — OpenAI has supposedly acquired Windsurf and has its own coding agent in Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, and Google has recently launched Jules, its own coding agent. As such these companies will look to develop their own ecosystems, much like Microsoft and Google had done in the internet era, and might not allow other players to use their models within their systems. It remains to be seen how the AI race plays out, but early signs show that top AI labs are looking to extend beyond being pure model plays to owning a greater share of the consumer market.