It 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.
> 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?
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.