Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf: ‘It would be odd for us to sell Claude to OpenAI’

Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf’s direct access to Anthropic’s Claude AI models largely because of rumors and reports that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is acquiring the AI coding assistant.

“We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future,” said Kaplan during an onstage interview Thursday with TechCrunch at TC Sessions: AI 2025.

“I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI,” Kaplan said.

The comment comes just a few weeks after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion. Earlier this week, Windsurf said that Anthropic cut its direct access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, two of the more popular AI models for coding, forcing the startup to find third-party computing providers on relatively short notice. Windsurf said it was disappointed in Anthropic’s decision and that it might cause short-term instability for users trying to access Claude via Windsurf.

Windsurf declined to comment on Kaplan’s remarks, and an OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request. The companies have not confirmed the acquisition rumors.

Part of the reason Anthropic cut Windsurf’s access to Claude, according to Kaplan, is because the company is quite computing-constrained today. Anthropic would like to reserve its computing for what Kaplan characterized as “lasting partnerships.”

However, Kaplan said the company hopes to greatly increase the availability of models it can offer users and developers in the coming months. He added that Anthropic has just started to unlock capacity on a new computing cluster from its partner, Amazon, which he says is “really big and continues to scale.”

As Anthropic pulls away from Windsurf, Kaplan said he’s collaborating with other customers building AI coding tools, such as Cursor — a company Kaplan said Anthropic expects to work with for a long time. Kaplan rejected the idea that Anthropic was in competition with companies like Cursor, which is developing its own AI models.

Meanwhile, Kaplan says Anthropic is increasingly focused on developing its own agentic coding products, such as Claude Code, rather than AI chatbot experiences. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are competing for the most popular AI chatbot platform, Kaplan said the chatbot paradigm was limiting due to its static nature, and that AI agents would in the long run be much more helpful for users.