OpenAI reaches agreement to acquire coding startup Windsurf for about $3 billion

Bloomberg reported that OpenAI had reached an agreement to acquire Windsurf, an AI coding assistant and IDE formerly known as Codeium, for approximately $3 billion — what would have been OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date. Neither company confirmed the deal on the record at the time, and reporting made clear it had not yet closed. Windsurf’s product let developers direct an AI agent to write and edit code across a project rather than working line by line, part of the “agentic coding” category that had grown quickly through 2025 alongside competitors such as Cursor.

The reported deal had immediate competitive consequences. Weeks later, Anthropic — whose Claude models Windsurf relied on to power parts of its product — cut off nearly all of Windsurf’s direct access to Claude on short notice. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan later said it would be “odd” for the company to keep supplying its models to a startup about to become part of a direct rival, forcing Windsurf to scramble for alternative compute providers.

The acquisition never closed. In July, Google instead hired Windsurf’s chief executive Varun Mohan and much of its senior research staff in a $2.4 billion licensing-and-hiring arrangement that left the company without its founders, and days later rival Cognition acquired what remained of Windsurf — its product, brand and staff. The collapsed OpenAI deal became an early example of how quickly a reported acquisition could be overtaken by a competitor’s acquihire once exclusivity lapsed, in a market moving fast enough that a startup’s ownership could change twice within a few months of the first reported deal.