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.