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Autonomous AI coding startup Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, the AI developer tools startup best known for its agentic integrated development environment (IDE). The two companies made the announcement on their respective X accounts on Monday. No acquisition amount was disclosed publicly, nor were specific terms of the deal (both are private startups).
The acquisition gives Cognition access to Windsurf’s core product, brand and remaining team — but not its original CEO or co-founders, several of whom have joined Google in a separate $2.4 billion talent and licensing deal, as The Verge first reported last week.
In a joint video posted to X featuring Cognition CEO Scott Wu and interim Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, the leaders said they would start by integrating Cognition’s autonomous AI-powered engineer Devin into Windsurf’s IDE.
This combined offering is aimed at enabling developers to plan tasks, delegate code generation to AI agents and review pull requests — all within a single interface.
“This is a perfect fit,” said Wang, who was previously Windsurf’s head of business. “Working with the best engineering team in the space will be an incredible unlock for our product and our go-to-market team.”
In a company blog post titled “The Next Chapter,” Wang directly acknowledged the internal upheaval: “Last week, we lost our founders and our research team.”
He praised the remaining staff for their professionalism during the transition and emphasized that despite the disruption, “so much of what makes us great is intact.”
According to Wang, Windsurf continues to double enterprise revenue quarter-over-quarter and maintains hundreds of thousands of daily active users.
Cognition emphasized that the deal includes full financial participation for Windsurf employees, including waived cliffs and accelerated vesting.
Wang also stated in the announcement video: “And of course, we’re friends with Anthropic again,” an overt reference to Windsurf’s prior falling out with the separate AI model provider company that resulted in Anthropic Claude models being pulled from the list of options that developers could rely on to power their Windsurf AI coding agents and processes.
But the new chapter follows a chaotic and fragmented few months marked by aborted acquisition talks, lost model access and major executive departures.
Fragmented exit: Cognition gets the product and users, Google gets the founders
On July 11, Google confirmed it had hired Varun Mohan, Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO, along with other senior R&D team members.
CNBC reported that Google is paying $2.4 billion in compensation and licensing fees as part of the deal, which includes a nonexclusive license to select Windsurf technology.
The deal does not include any equity investment in Windsurf, nor a full acquisition of the company.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
Windsurf, meanwhile, retains the ability to license its technology and will continue operating independently under Wang’s leadership.
The split structure reflects a fragmented resolution to what had earlier been reported as a full-scale acquisition by OpenAI.
Bloomberg reported back in May that OpenAI had entered exclusivity negotiations to buy Windsurf for up to $3 billion. However, those talks fell apart, and OpenAI later told CNBC that the exclusivity period had expired.
While the company never formally confirmed the OpenAI acquisition, the fallout was visible — Windsurf’s communications channels went silent, its product experienced instability and multiple partners reportedly backed away.
Friends with Anthropic yet again
Among the most damaging blows came from Anthropic, which revoked Windsurf’s access to its Claude 3 model family in early June.
In a statement published on its blog, Windsurf confirmed that Anthropic had cut off nearly all first-party API capacity to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and related models with less than a week’s notice.
In response, Windsurf had to reroute traffic through third-party inference providers and restrict access for free-tier users. The company also launched promotional pricing for Gemini Pro as a temporary substitute.
Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan explained the decision at TechCrunch Sessions: AI 2025, saying the company could not justify supplying its largest competitor, OpenAI, with access to its models via a middle layer.
“It would be odd for us to sell Claude to OpenAI,” he said, citing both competitive tension and Anthropic’s limited compute capacity. Kaplan added that Anthropic prefers to focus on “lasting partnerships” like the one it maintains with Cursor.
Windsurf, in its statement, expressed disappointment and emphasized that its platform is about more than just model access. “The magic of Windsurf has never been limited to the model,” the company wrote, highlighting UX features, enterprise integrations and agentic workflows.
A new product vision for the combined Windsurf/Cognition/Devin
Cognition’s agreement now brings long-needed clarity to Windsurf’s operational direction. In a video announcing the deal, Wu’s Cognition described how the two platforms will integrate: “Imagine planning tasks in Windsurf, launching a team of Devins, and reviewing PRs from the comfort of your IDE.”
Devin, which can autonomously complete software tasks such as fixing bugs and deploying apps, will now be embedded directly into Windsurf’s IDE.
The companies say this setup will give developers the ability to offload repetitive work to multiple agents in parallel, while still keeping control over key architectural decisions.
Cognition views this as the next step in building collaborative human-agent systems, and says Windsurf’s IDE provides the missing interface layer to make agentic workflows practical at scale. Both companies expressed confidence that users will benefit from a more fluid, tightly integrated development experience.
The Windsurf blog post also expanded on product-level plans, confirming that Windsurf’s existing features like Tab and Cascade — used for manual high-leverage coding — will remain integrated in the IDE.
Developers will be able to assign work to “a team of Devins” while still jumping in to complete or edit complex parts themselves. “It seamlessly gets stitched back together all within the same environment,” Wang wrote.
Consolidation amid competition
The combined Cognition-Windsurf entity now competes directly with GitHub Copilot, Replit, Cursor and other AI-native IDE players. Google’s Gemini platform and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code with “agent mode” are also expanding rapidly into this space.
Devin made headlines earlier this year because of its ability to autonomously solve GitHub issues and complete end-to-end coding tasks. Merging that capability with Windsurf’s customizable environment — including features like Previews, Reviews and Enterprise workflows — may create a product with fewer silos and more automation than rivals.
Still, the ongoing talent war means competitive advantage is short-lived. Google’s ability to hire Windsurf’s founding team — including Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen — signals that even partial exits now come with multibillion-dollar price tags. Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have made similar moves, absorbing key figures from startups like Scale AI, Adept and Inflection.
Despite the leadership shake-up, Windsurf is continuing operations under Wang’s leadership.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” he said in a statement.
Wang also emphasized that the team chose Cognition over other viable options, citing not only technical alignment but admiration: “They were the only team we were scared of.”
He noted that Cognition’s revenue is growing even faster than Windsurf’s, and that its $300 million in funding and $4 billion valuation reflect strong financial footing.
The company is expected to focus on enterprise readiness, agentic IDE capabilities and hybrid/federated deployments — core features that have helped it stand out in a crowded field.
For developers, the path forward now includes both continuity and change: A product that stays alive within Cognition, a founding team now at DeepMind and a landscape quickly consolidating around model access and engineering talent.
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