Battlelines are being drawn between the major AI labs and the popular applications that rely on them.
This week, both Anthropic and OpenAI took shots at two leading AI apps: Windsurf, one of the most popular vibe coding tools, and Granola, a buzzy AI app for taking meeting notes.
”With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models,” Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan wrote on X this week, noting that “we wanted to pay them for the full capacity.” An additional statement on Windsurf’s website said: “We are concerned that Anthropic’s conduct will harm many in the industry, not just Windsurf.”
Here, Mohan’s company is collateral damage in Anthropic’s rivalry with OpenAI, which has reportedly been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion. The deal hasn’t been confirmed, but even the spectre of it happening was enough for Anthropic to cut off one of the most popular apps that it powers. After a spokesperson told TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff that Anthropic was “prioritizing capacity for sustainable partnerships,” co-founder Jared Kaplan put it more bluntly.
“We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future,” Kaplan told Zeff. “I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI sent its own warning shot this week to the budding AI app ecosystem. It announced a “record mode” for ChatGPT — initially only for enterprise accounts — that transcribes calls and generates meeting notes.
Source: Popular AI apps get caught in the crosshairs of Anthropic and OpenAI
