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.
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?
But they're also crunched on Claude 4 capacity, if not more so than Anthropic's first-party access
And for that to happen you need to be (a) an effective monopoly, (b) have a negative direct or indirect impact on consumers, (c) large enough for regulators to care about and (d) be in a regulatory environment that priorities this enforcement.
Anticompetitive practices are actions that reduce competitiveness in a market by entrenching your dominance over the (usually smaller) competition.
Not allowing your competitor to buy your product arguably increases competition? It pushes them to improve their own product to be as good as yours.
https://www.businessinsider.com/restaurant-accused-reselling...
Grocery and department stores routinely have brands that compete with those they resell — but they’re not cut off for that. Eg, Kroger operates its own bakery and resells bread.
What makes technology unlike those?
IMHO, there are 3 types of products in current LLM space (excluding hardware):
* Model makers - OpenAI, Claude, Gemini
* Infra makers - Groq, together.ai and etc
* Product makers - Cursor, Windsurf and others
In the current example, we have a conglomerate between a level 1 (competitor) and a level 3 company, which lead this level 1 company to stop working with the specific level 3 company-part of the conglomerate. You cannot have your pie and eat it too. They could have chosen not to of course, but they chose this.
I think what would have been more problematic is if Antropic came to an exclusivity agreement with eg Cursor and then they made their models unavailable to all other platforms/products, in an attempt to monopolise the space. In this sense, the windsurf-openai relationship is what is actually problematic imo.