Anthropic Extends Block for Windsurf, Ends First-Party Capacity

Anthropic has cut off first-party access to Claude 3.x models on the AI coding tool Windsurf, forcing the platform to limit usage and pivot to alternative methods with less than a week’s notice.

Windsurf, in a statement on Tuesday, said it lost nearly all direct Claude 3.x capacity, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet, and 3.7 Sonnet (thinking) after Anthropic’s abrupt move. Some capacity remains via third-party inference providers, but not enough to meet existing demand. As a result, Claude 3.x access has been pulled from free and trial users, though it remains available via bring-your-own-key (BYOK). Claude Sonnet 4 is also accessible via the BYOK approach.

To ease the transition, Windsurf has introduced a 0.75x promotional rate for Gemini 2.5 Pro. “Users may have some short-term capacity issues with the Claude 3.x models as the new capacity comes online, but we should be fine,” the company further stated.

Varun Mohan, founder of Windsurf, echoed the team’s frustration in a post on X. “We wanted to pay them for the full capacity. We are disappointed by this decision and the short notice,” he wrote, adding that alternative model capacity has ramped up rapidly and that Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4.1 and others remain unaffected.

Windsurf, in the statement, emphasised its past commitment to maintaining Anthropic models as recommended options. They had explicitly communicated this priority to the Anthropic team. Moreover, Windsurf cautioned that this decision might have far-reaching consequences across the industry.

Despite the setback, Windsurf stressed its value extends beyond model access, pointing to features like Previews, Deploys, and agentic integrations with JetBrains. “The magic is in the product,” the company said.

This comes right after Windsurf was not given direct access to the Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus 4 models after their release.