Probably 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.
Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
11–20 of 117 posts
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#12Any 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 p…
Or AWS, and AWS managed services v.s. other managed services on top of AWS.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#13These 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?
I 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.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#14Any 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 p…
The 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.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#15I'm sure this all fits neatly into their EA "maximizing positive outcomes for humanity" world-view somehow.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#16I 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 "
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#17This 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.
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.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#18This 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.
This 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.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#19Any 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 p…
The 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 e…
> 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.)
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#20Probably 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.
How is that relevant?