Google Swoops on Failed OpenAI Deal
Rowan Cheung

Google Swoops on Failed OpenAI Deal

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3 highlights

Google is hiring Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and several researchers in a $2.4B licensing deal, coming in the wake of the coding startup’s $3B acquisition deal with OpenAI collapsing over complications in its partnership with Microsoft.

• The OpenAI agreement reportedly fell through over Windsurf’s concerns around Microsoft’s access to its tech through existing partnership agreements.

• The $3B deal had an exclusivity deadline that expired after Microsoft refused to give OAI an exception that would allow Windsurf to avoid sharing its IP.

Chinese startup Moonshot AI released Kimi-K2, a massive 1T parameter open-weights model that matches or beats frontier-level models across a range of benchmarks, with particular strength in coding and agentic tasks.