The move is the culmination of a turbulent period for Windsurf, and indicates that agentic IDEs have become a new battleground.
AI builders are starving for agentic integrated development environments (IDEs), which help developers code more efficiently and thus, ideally, speed up production. And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the tug-of-war over Windsurf.
In the latest development, AI coding startup Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the rival platform, giving it access to Windsurf’s product, brand, and remaining employees. This comes after Google pulled Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and several R&D employees into its Google DeepMind team in a $2.4 billion talent and licensing grab.
It also follows the surprise termination of the expected $3 billion purchase of Windsurf by OpenAI that had seemed all but a done deal, but didn’t materialize due to intellectual property (IP) tensions with Microsoft, a key OpenAI partner and investor. Over a period of 72 hours, OpenAI’s purchase offer expired, Google hired away Windsurf’s top leaders and team members, and Cognition swooped in to snap up the remaining assets.
What Cognition gains from Windsurf
“As far as the market implications go, we’re seeing agentic IDEs become the next competitive space,” observed Wyatt Mayham of Northwest AI Consulting.
Cognition’s flagship product is Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer that completes various development tasks. The company says it has been deployed in production-grade codebases at enterprises around the world.
With the Windsurf acquisition, Cognition will enhance its offering as it gains ownership of:
- The Windsurf IDE, with full access to the latest Anthropic Claude models;
- Windsurf’s IP, including trademark and brand;
- A user base of more than 350 enterprise customers and “hundreds of thousands” of daily active users.
The combined platforms will allow engineering teams to plan a task in Windsurf using Devin’s deep codebase understanding, and to delegate work to teams of AI agents so that they can tackle more difficult tasks in Windsurf via features such as Tab (code completion) and Cascade (multi-step code edits). “Then it seamlessly gets stitched back together all within the same environment,” Windsurf’s CEO Jeff Wang wrote in a blog post. He said the Cognition-Windsurf combo will allow for a “combined agent + IDE” that can lead to “breakthrough developer experiences.”
Mayham noted that, while Devin had strong autonomous capabilities, it lacked a practical interface for daily development. With Windsurf, Cognition will now have an enterprise-ready IDE where “autonomous workflows can live,” giving developers tools to manage higher-level architecture while delegating routine work to AI.
“The reason why Windsurf was attractive was because they moved beyond autocomplete and built a true agentic IDE,” said Mayham. “Their agent, Cascade, could refactor across multiple files, understand project architecture, run tests, and handle linting errors.”
An increasingly competitive market
IDEs have gained prominence in recent months thanks to the “vibe coding” trend in which AI is used to automate tasks throughout the coding pipeline. Windsurf is considered one of the top IDE tools, along with Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Bolt, and Aider, and others.
Bigger players are getting into the game, too: This week, AWS announced Kiro, a free-to-use (for now) agentic IDE that helps developers move from concept to production. It uses a “spec-driven development” approach with an “agent hooks” feature, according to AWS.
Specs are artifacts that help developers refactor work or understand system behavior, while hooks help catch things they miss or perform boilerplate tasks in the background. Kiro also provides support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source framework that is quickly becoming the accepted standard for connecting AI tools with data sources.
Mayham underscored Kiro’s unique approach to enforcing spec-first development. When choosing platforms, “enterprises will have to choose between flexible, agent-driven models and more structured workflows,” he noted. “Either way, AI-assisted development is moving from code suggestions to full-context project collaboration.”
It’s not surprising that there’s been so much interest in Windsurf, said Rob Garmaise, VP of AI research at Info-Tech Research Group. He called it “a step up for Cognition and Google,” and said his firm is expecting to see more counter moves from Microsoft and Amazon.
However, “the bottom line is that Cursor is dominating this market right now with its agent-based IDE approach,” he said.
He said that, in an internal challenge, Info-Tech’s development team adopted and tested various coding tools, then ranked the results. Cursor came out on top by far, followed by GitHub, but “most other competitors aren’t even close,” Garmaise noted. Windsurf placed fourth in their evaluation.
That being said, Garmaise pointed out, it’s still early in the game, and everyone is still vying for position.
“Our view is that these tools (especially Cursor) are now ready for enterprise adoption,” he said. “We don’t think we’re at the point where these tools are replacing developers quite yet, but they certainly provide an important productivity boost for new and established developers alike across a wide variety of use cases.”
