OpenAI's largest acquisition could help CEO Sam Altman make coders 10x more productive with "Windsurf" agentic IDE

OpenAI is reportedly in discussions to acquire agentic AI-powered coding tool Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for approximately $3 billion.

According to Bloomberg, this would be OpenAI's largest deal yet if it goes through as planned. To that end, both Windsurf and OpenAI remain tight-lipped about the potential acquisition, but Bloomberg and CNBC have it on good authority that the deal is in the discussion phase, per their sources.

Interestingly, OpenAI attempted to acquire Cursor AI from Anysphere, another AI-powered coding tool, but its offer was shot down. However, the ChatGPT maker reached out to Anysphere again last year, but didn't make any headway with the potential acquisition because both parties failed to reach common ground.

This news comes after OpenAI recently launched its o3 and o4-mini reasoning models. During their launch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the models are “super good at coding."

The AI lab also unveiled Codex CLI, a product designed to help users learn how to navigate and interact with the models, making the easier to use. Over the past few months, we've seen companies such as Microsoft unveil programs like Copilot Academy designed to help users enhance their prompt engineering skills.

This is in the tails of a leaked report that suggests the top complaint at Microsoft's AI division from customers inquiring why Copilot isn't as good as ChatGPT. The tech giant dismissed the claims, indicating that ChatGPT isn't better than Copilot, suggesting that users simply weren't leveraging its capabilities as intended.

It's no secret that OpenAI wants to preserve its lead in the AI race against its competitors in the space, including Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic. The ChatGPT maker recently concluded its latest round of funding led by SoftBank, where it raised $40 billion from investors, pushing its market cap to $300 billion.

If OpenAI's acquisition of Windsurf goes through, the company could integrate its technology across its AI models, making them more efficient at coding in general.

In a separate report, Sam Altman indicated that he's less interested in fully replacing coders, but more focused on making them 10x more productive using AI.