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by HyprMusic 372 days ago
This feels like a cheap trick to drive users towards Claude Code. It's likely no coincidence that this happened at the same time they announced subscription access to Claude Code.

The Windsurf team repeatedly stated that they're running at a loss so all this seems to have achieved is giving OpenAI an excuse to cut their 3rd party costs and drive more Windsurf users towards their own models.
2 comments
artdigital 372 days ago
> This feels like a cheap trick to drive users towards Claude Code

How did you come to this conclusion? It’s very much like he remarked: OpenAI acquired Windsurf, OpenAI is Anthropics direct competitor.

It doesn’t make strategic sense to sell Claude to OpenAI. OpenAI could train against Claude weights, or OpenAI can cut out Anthropic at any moment to push their own models.

The partnership isn’t long lasting so it doesn’t make sense to continue it.

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selcuka 372 days ago
> OpenAI could train against Claude weights

OpenAI can always buy a Claude API subscription with a credit card if they want to train something. This change only prevents the Windsurf product from offering Claude APIs to their customers.

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brookst 372 days ago
Other than, you know, terms and contracts.
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selcuka 372 days ago
But that's a completely different story, no? Cutting off Windsurf has nothing to do with enforcing that T&C.
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huxley 372 days ago
Totally irrelevant, Anthropic isn’t cutting off OpenAI, it is cutting off Windsurf users.
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artdigital 372 days ago
Windsurf users can still plug their own Anthropic key and continue using the models. It’s Windsurf subscribers (eg OpenAI customers) that use the models through the Windsurf service (through their servers as proxy, that’s now OpenAI) are getting cut off

I don’t see how this is irrelevant. Windsurf is a first party product of their most direct competitor. Imagine a car company integrating the cloud tech of a different manufacturer

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HyprMusic 372 days ago
Exactly, it's like car manufacturers cutting off Android because Google own Waymo. The only people that pay are the consumers.
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ramesh31 372 days ago
Nobody is actually using Windsurf. It was an acquihire and a squashing of competition that caught ground in the enterprise contract market really early. Anyone doing agentic coding seriously is using open source tooling with direct token pricing to the major model providers. Windsurf/Cursor/et. al are just expensive middlemen with no added value.
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peterhadlaw 372 days ago
Which open source agentic tooling are you using. I'm a fan of Aider but I find it lacking the agentic side of things. I've looked at Goose, Plandex, Opencode, and etc. Which do you like?
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ramesh31 372 days ago
Cline all the way: https://cline.bot/.

Haven't found anything else that even comes close.

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peterhadlaw 372 days ago
Dang, was hoping for something terminal based <3 but thank you
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TiredOfLife 372 days ago
If nobody is using then why cut off access?
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