Vibe-coding startup Windsurf revealed that Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to its Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI models. According to Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, Anthropic gave little notice to Windsurf — which is reportedly being acquired by OpenAI — before making this change.
“We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire — we wanted to pay them for the full capacity,” said Mohan on X. “We are disappointed by this decision and short notice.”
Windsurf said via a blog post that it has some capacity with third-party inference providers but not enough, so this change may create short-term availability issues for Windsurf users trying to access Claude. “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, adding that it has removed direct access to Claude 3.x models to Free tier users (or trials of the Pro plan), and added access to all of these models via BYOK (bring-your-own-key).
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Claude Sonnet 4 will continue to be accessible via bring-your-own-key. Windsurf said it did not receive direct access from Anthropic to run Claude 4 on its platform on launch day, and it still doesn’t have this access. Meanwhile, other popular AI coding tools — including Anysphere’s Cursor, Cognition’s Devin, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot — seemed to have direct access to Claude 4 models at launch.
Anthropic’s rival OpenAI has reportedly closed a deal to acquire Windsurf. This deal, worth $3 billion, is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition. Meanwhile, Anthropic launched its own AI coding application Claude Code in February and in May, the startup held its first Code with Claude developer conference.
“We’re prioritizing capacity for sustainable partnerships that allow us to effectively serve the broader developer community,” said Anthropic spokesperson Steve Mnich to TechCrunch noting that it’s still possible to access Claude 4 on Windsurf via an API key. “Developers can also access Claude through our direct API integration, our partner ecosystem, and other development tools.” Several others expressed frustration over the lack of direct access to Anthropic’s best AI coding models.
Ronald Mannak, founder of Swift, a startup that specializes in Apple’s programming language, told TechCrunch that Claude 4 represented a significant jump in capabilities for his workloads. While Mannak has been a Windsurf customer since late 2024, he’s switched to using Cursor in recent weeks so that he can vibe code more easily with Claude 4.
Windsurf spokesperson Payal Patel says that the company has always believed in providing optionality for users. Anthropic has apparently made this challenging.