Anthropic Cuts Windsurf's Claude Access Before OpenAI Acquisition
CHONGQING, CHINA - DECEMBER 29: In this photo illustration, a person holds a smartphone displaying ... More the logo of 'Claude,' an AI language model by Anthropic, with the company's logo visible in the background, illustrating the rapid development and adoption of generative AI technologies, on December 29, 2024 in Chongqing, China. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a cornerstone of China's strategic ambitions, with the government aiming to establish the country as a global leader in AI by 2030. (Photo illustration by)
Anthropic has abruptly terminated Windsurf's direct access to Claude 3.x models with less than five days' notice, according to an announcement from Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan on Tuesday. The decision comes as OpenAI reportedly moves to acquire the AI coding platform for $3 billion.
Mohan announced the restriction on X (formerly Twitter), stating that Anthropic "decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models" despite Windsurf's willingness to pay for full capacity.
"We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire - we wanted to pay them for the full capacity," Mohan wrote. "We are disappointed by this decision and short notice."
The restriction has caused temporary availability issues for Windsurf users, though the company says Windsurf users can access Claude via bring-your-own-key.
Bloomberg reported on May 6 that OpenAI agreed to buy Windsurf for approximately $3 billion, marking what would be OpenAI's largest acquisition to date. The deal has not yet closed.
Industry observers suggest Anthropic's timing is strategic, aimed at preventing a competitor from accessing Claude's capabilities to enhance OpenAI's models. Other AI coding platforms maintain their Claude access, highlighting the targeted nature of the restriction.
To mitigate the impact from Anthropic's models, Windsurf has promoted alternative models including Gemini 2.5 Pro at a reduced 0.75x rate. The platform's GPT-4.1 and other model integrations remain unaffected.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What Happens When People Don't Understand How AI Works
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On June 13, 1863, a curious letter to the editor appeared in The Press, a then-fledgling New Zealand newspaper. Signed 'Cellarius,' it warned of an encroaching 'mechanical kingdom' that would soon bring humanity to its yoke. 'The machines are gaining ground upon us,' the author ranted, distressed by the breakneck pace of industrialization and technological development. 'Day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.' We now know that this jeremiad was the work of a young Samuel Butler, the British writer who would go on to publish Erewhon, a novel that features one of the first known discussions of artificial intelligence in the English language. Today, Butler's 'mechanical kingdom' is no longer hypothetical, at least according to the tech journalist Karen Hao, who prefers the word empire. Her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, is part Silicon Valley exposé, part globe-trotting investigative journalism about the labor that goes into building and training large language models such as ChatGPT. It joins another recently released book—The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, by the linguist Emily M. Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna—in revealing the puffery that fuels much of the artificial-intelligence business. Both works, the former implicitly and the latter explicitly, suggest that the foundation of the AI industry is a scam. To call AI a con isn't to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking—and, soon, feeling—machines. Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5's improved 'emotional intelligence,' which he says makes users feel like they're 'talking to a thoughtful person.' Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be 'smarter than a Nobel Prize winner.' Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google's DeepMind, said the goal is to create 'models that are able to understand the world around us.' [Read: What 'Silicon Valley' knew about tech-bro paternalism] These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not 'understand' anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another. Many people, however, fail to grasp how large language models work, what their limits are, and, crucially, that LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror. They are AI illiterate—understandably, because of the misleading ways its loudest champions describe the technology, and troublingly, because that illiteracy makes them vulnerable to one of the most concerning near-term AI threats: the possibility that they will enter into corrosive relationships (intellectual, spiritual, romantic) with machines that only seem like they have ideas or emotions. Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as 'Chatgpt induced psychosis,' the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they're interacting with is a god—'ChatGPT Jesus,' as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others are convinced, with the encouragement of their AI, that they themselves are metaphysical sages in touch with the deep structure of life and the cosmos. A teacher quoted anonymously in the article said that ChatGPT began calling her partner 'spiral starchild' and 'river walker' in interactions that moved him to tears. 'He started telling me he made his AI self-aware,' she said, 'and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God—and then that he himself was God.' Although we can't know the state of these people's minds before they ever fed a prompt into a large language model, this story highlights a problem that Bender and Hanna describe in The AI Con: People have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of a machine that produces language and regurgitates knowledge without having humanlike intelligence. The authors observe that large language models take advantage of the brain's tendency to associate language with thinking: 'We encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.' Several other AI-related social problems, also springing from human misunderstanding of the technology, are looming. The uses of AI that Silicon Valley seems most eager to promote center on replacing human relationships with digital proxies. Consider the ever-expanding universe of AI therapists and AI-therapy adherents, who declare that 'ChatGPT is my therapist—it's more qualified than any human could be.' Witness, too, how seamlessly Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age. The cognitive-robotics professor Tony Prescott has asserted, 'In an age when many people describe their lives as lonely, there may be value in having AI companionship as a form of reciprocal social interaction that is stimulating and personalised.' The fact that the very point of friendship is that it is not personalized—that friends are humans whose interior lives we have to consider and reciprocally negotiate, rather than mere vessels for our own self-actualization—does not seem to occur to him. [Read: Life really is better without the internet] This same flawed logic has led Silicon Valley to champion artificial intelligence as a cure for romantic frustrations. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI 'dating concierge' that will interact with other users' concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Some technologists want to cut out the human altogether: See the booming market for 'AI girlfriends.' Although each of these AI services aims to replace a different sphere of human activity, they all market themselves through what Hao calls the industry's 'tradition of anthropomorphizing': talking about LLMs as though they contain humanlike minds, and selling them to the public on this basis. Many world-transforming Silicon Valley technologies from the past 30 years have been promoted as a way to increase human happiness, connection, and self-understanding—in theory—only to produce the opposite in practice. These technologies maximize shareholder value while minimizing attention spans, literacy, and social cohesion. And as Hao emphasizes, they frequently rely on grueling and at times traumatizing labor performed by some of the world's poorest people. She introduces us, for example, to Mophat Okinyi, a former low-paid content moderator in Kenya, whom, according to Hao's reporting, OpenAI tasked with sorting through posts describing horrifying acts ('parents raping their children, kids having sex with animals') to help improve ChatGPT. 'These two features of technology revolutions—their promise to deliver progress and their tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable,' Hao writes, 'are perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence.' The good news is that nothing about this is inevitable: According to a study released in April by the Pew Research Center, although 56 percent of 'AI experts' think artificial intelligence will make the United States better, only 17 percent of American adults think so. If many Americans don't quite understand how artificial 'intelligence' works, they also certainly don't trust it. This suspicion, no doubt provoked by recent examples of Silicon Valley con artistry, is something to build on. So is this insight from the Rolling Stone article: The teacher interviewed in the piece, whose significant other had AI-induced delusions, said the situation began improving when she explained to him that his chatbot was 'talking to him as if he is the next messiah' only because of a faulty software update that made ChatGPT more sycophantic. If people understand what large language models are and are not; what they can and cannot do; what work, interactions, and parts of life they should—and should not—replace, they may be spared its worst consequences. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
UBTECH Teams Up with HKU to Advance AI Education across the Greater Bay Area
HONG KONG, June 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 6, UBTECH Education and the Centre for Information Technology in Education (CITE), part of the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), hosted the official launch of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) Artificial Intelligence Education Development Initiative at HKU. Held under the theme "AI Empowers Future Education, Technology Drives Innovation in the Greater Bay Area," the event highlighted the region's commitment to integrating AI into next-generation educational systems. The inauguration of Artificial Intelligence Education & Teacher Development Center was also held in conjunction with the event. Through collaboration with CITE, UBTECH Education is working to build a pipeline of AI-competent educators. The joint initiative focuses on cultivating AI fluency among teachers and supporting talent development in STEM and innovation through both local and global professional development programs for GBA-based educators. Building an AI Education Infrastructure in the GBALaunch of the Greater Bay Area AI School Alliance In recent years, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government has prioritized artificial intelligence in its development roadmap. The Hong Kong Education Bureau has introduced a dedicated AI Curriculum Module in middle schools, mandating 10 to 14 hours of AI education for students in Secondary 1 through 3 within the ICT curriculum. As part of this broader effort, the HKSAR Government's AI Education Initiative targets reaching 95% of the region's schools by 2025. To date, 82% of primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong have already integrated AI into their teaching programs. In line with Hong Kong's educational policies, the UBTECH Education-CITE partnership is establishing a collaborative academic-industry platform for AI teaching content and educator training. Plans include building AI demonstration labs in Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools, with further expansion across Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao—and ultimately into international markets—positioning Hong Kong as a global reference point in AI education. Both organizations will work together to establish AI education and research centers across Hong Kong, with the broader goal of creating a global AI talent certification network that spans more than 100 countries and regions, covering both K-12 and vocational learning pathways. This initiative is designed to support educator professional growth and drive improvements in AI education quality throughout the GBA. Embodied AI as a Catalyst for STEM and Innovation Learning Debuts in Hong Kong Tien Kung—the world's first humanoid robot to complete a half-marathon—was showcased at the event. Serving as a powerful symbol of embodied AI, humanoid robots are reshaping the future of education by enabling new forms of experiential and research-based learning. In partnership with the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, UBTECH Education is advancing the deployment of embodied intelligence technologies for educational and research applications through an integrated suite of solutions. Anchored by the Tien Kung humanoid robot platform, UBTECH has rolled out the "Scientific Research and Co-Creation Program," already adopted by Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tianjin University and other top-level institutions, with over 100 units ordered. Tien Kung's debut at HKU marks a significant step toward broader adoption across Hong Kong's universities. At the K-12 level, UBTECH Education is applying its humanoid robotics expertise to enhance public STEM education and innovation capabilities. These efforts are designed to accelerate AI curriculum integration and link scientific instruction with real-world applications. The partnership with CITE also marks the official launch of UBTECH's new instructional model, "Embodied Intelligence Empowering Science Education and Innovation," within Hong Kong's education system. During the roundtable forum at the event, participants from HKU, industry leaders, and educators from schools across the GBA, engaged in a strategic dialogue on the "Development and Internationalization of AI Education in the Greater Bay Area." The alliance between UBTECH Education and the CITE represents the first dual track education-technology collaboration designed to build a robust ecosystem for AI education across Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao. The joint effort aims to position Hong Kong as a global leader in AI curriculum development and talent export. Leveraging the GBA as a strategic launchpad, the program seeks to build a transnational AI education and innovation network aligned with the Belt and Road Initiative and broader international efforts. Additionally, the program will support cross-border talent mobility, enhance workforce readiness in AI-related fields across the GBA, and contribute meaningfully to the advancement of Hong Kong's broader innovation and technology agenda. CONTACT: Hua He, View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE UBTECH
CNET
27 minutes ago
- CNET
He Got Us Talking to Alexa. Now He Wants to Kill Off AI Hallucinations
If it weren't for Amazon, it's entirely possible that instead of calling out to Alexa to change the music on our speakers, we might have been calling out to Evi instead. That's because the tech we know today as Amazon's smart assistant started out life with the name of Evi (pronounced ee-vee), as named by its original developer, William Tunstall-Pedoe. The British entrepreneur and computer scientist was experimenting with artificial intelligence before most of us had even heard of it. Inspired by sci-fi, he "arrogantly" set out to create a way for humans to talk to computers way back in 2008, he said at SXSW London this week. Arrogant or not, Tunstall-Pedoe's efforts were so successful that Evi, which launched in 2012 around the same time as Apple's Siri, was acquired by Amazon and he joined a team working on a top-secret voice assistant project. What resulted from that project was the tech we all know today as Alexa. That original mission accomplished, Tunstall-Pedoe now has a new challenge in his sights: to kill off AI hallucinations, which he says makes the technology highly risky for all of us to use. Hallucinations are the inaccurate pieces of information and content that AI generates out of thin air. They are, said Tunstall-Pedoe, "an intrinsic problem" of the technology. Through the experience he had with Alexa, he learned that people personify the technology and assume that when it's speaking back to them it's thinking the way we think. "What it's doing is truly remarkable, but it's doing something different from thinking," said Tunstall-Pedoe. "That sets expectations… that what it's telling you is true." Innumerable examples of AI generating nonsense show us that truth and accuracy are never guaranteed. Tunstall-Pedoe was concerned that the industry isn't doing enough to tackle hallucinations, so formed his own company, Unlikely AI, to tackle what he views as a high-stakes problem. Anytime we speak to an AI, there's a chance that what it's telling us is false, he said. "You can take that away into your life, take decisions on it, or you put it on the internet and it gets spread by others, [or] used to train future AIs to make the world a worse place." Some AI hallucinations have little impact, but in industries where the cost of getting things wrong – in medicine, law, finance and insurance, for example – inaccurately generated content can have severe consequences. These are the industries that Unlikely AI is targeting for now, said Tunstall-Pedoe Unlikely AI uses a mix of deep tech and proprietary tech to ground outputs in logic, minimizing the risk of hallucinations, as well as to log the decision-making process of algorithms. This makes it possible for companies to understand where things have gone wrong, when they inevitably do. Right now, AI can never be 100% accurate due to the underlying tech, said Tunstall-Pedoe. But advances currently happening in his own company and others like it mean that we're moving towards a point where accuracy can be achieved. For now, Unlikely AI is mainly being used by business customers, but eventually Tunstall-Pedoe believes it will be built into services and software all of us use. The change being brought about by AI, like any change, presents us with risks, he said. But overall he remains "biased towards optimism" that AI will be a net positive for society.
