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Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
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- nickthegreek 1y agoNow your company needs to worry about building workflows on the back of these neat AI companies, they got bought out and cause a disruption that can reverberate through the org in unknown ways for unknown amounts of time. This and the openai no deletion court order should be a wake up call on how these technologies get implemented and the trust we cede to them.
- sebmellen 1y agoIt’s no different from the shell games that have been going on in enterprise software for the past 30 years. You can choose independence if you’re willing to use a slightly worse open weight model.
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- icelancer 1y agoThis seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't really understand why Windsurf, owned by OpenAI (allegedly), should expect to have API access to their main competitor's API. People can still bring their own key and use whatever models they want in that way.
- BoorishBears 1y agoIt doesn't make sense and the co-founder is being an intentionally crappy communicator. He's trying to paint it as removing access to something everyone gets by default, but in reality it's removing special treatment that they were previously giving Windsurf. The default Anthropic rate limit tiers don't support something Windsurf sized, and right now getting increased rate limits outside of their predefined tiers is an uphill battle because of how badly they're compute constrained.
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- consumer451 1y ago> 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. As a Windsurf user, maybe Sonnet 3.x models are slower right now, but they don't require BYOK like 4 does. So this is a bit of an exaggeration, isn't it? Anthropic did not cut them off, they seem to have continued honoring existing quota on previous agreements. What did Windsurf think was going to happen with this particular exit? Also, how embarrassing is this for OpenAI that it's even a big deal?
- BoorishBears 1y agoThey could have moved to Bedrock or Vertex, which both resell Claude access and have autonomy in who they allocate higher rate limits to. But they're also crunched on Claude 4 capacity, if not more so than Anthropic's first-party access
- tuyguntn 1y agoThis seems odd to me, I don't expect bakery to reject selling me a bread this morning, because I started working in another bakery nearby.
- princealiiiii 1y agoAny app built on top of these model providers could become a competitor to these providers. Since the model providers are currently in the lowest-margin part of the business, it is likely they will try to expand in to the app layer and start pulling the rug from under these businesses built on top of them. Amazon had a similar tactic, where it would use other sellers on its marketplace to validate market demand for products, and then produce its own cheap copies of the successes.
- liuliu 1y agoOr AWS, and AWS managed services v.s. other managed services on top of AWS.
- jsnell 1y agoThe model providers are not in the low margin part of the business. The unit economies of paid-per-token APIs are clearly favorable, and scale amazingly well as long as you can procure enough compute. I think it's the subscription-based models that are tricky to make work in the long term, since they suffer from adverse selection. Only the heaviest users will pay for a subscription, and those are the users that you either lose money on or make unhappy with strict usage limits. It's kind of the inverse of the gym membership model. Honestly, I think the subscriptions are mainly used as a demand moderation method for advanced features.
- raincole 1y ago> The model providers are not in the low margin part of the business. Many people believe that model providers are running at negative margin. (I don't know how true it is.)
- apothegm 1y agoThey probably have been running at negative margin, or at the very least started that way. But between hardware and software developments, their cost structures are undoubtedly improving over time —- otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing pricing drop with each new generation of models. In fact, I would bet that their margins are improving in spite of the price drops.
- widdakay 1y agoThese are two different products. It's like SpaceX launching satellites for competitive satellite internet services. They didn't care that they were providing launch capabilities for a competitor and neither should Anthropic. What if Apple stopped allowing you to use an iPhone if you worked at Google?
- thrdbndndn 1y agoI think the nature of your two examples, along with the one from the news, is too different from each other for the analogy to really hold. These situations can only be judged on a case-by-case basis.
- tonyhart7 1y ago"They didn't care that they were providing launch capabilities for a competitor" Yeah because another internet provider did not have SpaceX reusable rocket technology its not really quite the same you know
- killerstorm 1y agoDo you understand that data can be used for training?
- paxys 1y agoIf SpaceX was launching every rocket at a loss then they would absolutely care about a competitor taking advantage of it.
- demosthanos 1y ago> What if Apple stopped allowing you to use an iPhone if you worked at Google? This wouldn't be remotely comparable. This is targeting of a competitor's employees, not targeting a competitor's subsidiaries. If you want to go the Apple-Google route a better comparison would be that this is like Apple refusing to allow you to hook up an Air Tag on an Android phone. Which is something that they do, in fact, do.
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- dboreham 1y agoProbably most here are not old enough to remember, but there was a time when Google had all sorts of data access APIs and encouraged developers to create applications that used said APIs. And then they disabled them all.
- pton_xd 1y agoI'm sure this all fits neatly into their EA "maximizing positive outcomes for humanity" world-view somehow.
- CyberMacGyver 1y agoIt could be argued from Antrhopics perspective that OpenAI and Worldcoin are not positive for humanity so this in fact necessary
- dmix 1y agoI don't think EA people are pro going out of business so you don't have money.
- bravesoul2 1y agoCan't save humanity from the heat death of the universe without a castle.
- tuyguntn 1y agoI don't know what kind of agreement they had, or any agreement at all, but with this move, Anthropic is showing itself as an unreliable provider. It's same as: We can cut access anytime, "I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to <YOUR_COMPANY>"
- charlie0 1y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/restaurant-accused-reselling-costco-pizza-at-700-percent-markup-report-2020-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/restaurant-accused-reselling...
- mountainriver 1y agoThis should be a clear signal to the community that anthropic can’t be trusted. OpenAI can’t either, TBD on google
- alehlopeh 1y agoTBD on whether Google can be trusted? That ship sailed long ago.
- mountainriver 1y agoTo steal markets? Honestly I can’t think of one but someone can correct me I certainly don’t trust them to not kill whole products on demand
- k__ 1y agoWhen I read about Cursor and Windsurf, I'm quite happy that I only use Aider. An open source project, not associated with anyone else...
- bravesoul2 1y agoCurser and Windserf Yeah better to go with open technologies. Maybe use Groq for inference knowing you can switch over later if needed as you are using Llama or Deepseek.
- wincy 1y agoWow excited for when Anthropic buys Cursor in a couple months and I get locked out of using OpenAI models with it. This is depressing. I just want stuff to work.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y agoThis is why I use Aider. Open source or GTFO
- TiredOfLife 1y agoAnd then Anthropic cuts api access to Aider
- deadbabe 1y agoAren’t the OpenAI models worse than the alternatives?
- selcuka 1y agoAnthropic models are slightly better for coding tasks anyway. I believe Windsurf is in more trouble.
- brookst 1y agoFriendly advice: you will be happier if you defer reacting to things until they are actually real. We can all imagine all sorts or terrible futures. Many of us do. But there is no upside in being prematurely outraged.
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- HyprMusic 1y agoThis 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.
- ramesh31 1y agoNobody 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 1y agoWhich 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?
- ramesh31 1y agoCline all the way: https://cline.bot/ https://cline.bot/. Haven't found anything else that even comes close.
- peterhadlaw 1y agoDang, was hoping for something terminal based <3 but thank you
- TiredOfLife 1y agoIf nobody is using then why cut off access?
- bravesoul2 1y agoAntitrust? Maybe GitHub and Microsoft should kick out all competing company 3rd party integrations. See where this leads...
- arnaudsm 1y agoWe are about to enter the era of aggressive LLM monetisation and anti-competitivness. We got used to cheap subsidized models, in bet in 2 years we'll pay double for the same service.
- jmward01 1y agoDecisions like this may shoot them in the foot later as opensource and cheaper compute continues to push into frontier model territory. I know I have no loyalty to the big providers and would take a minor quality/cost hit to jump off. Right now it isn't a minor quality / cost hit though. Knowing that they can cut you off if they think you are going to end up competing with them makes me tolerate an even bigger gap.
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