Cognition swiftly snapped up the remnants of Windsurf. The deal highlights the essential role of data in AI advancement.

In a surprising move, Cognition– the makers of autonomous coding tool Devin— acquired what was left of its rival Windsurf after the company’s cofounders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and other staff members were poached by Google DeepMind for $2.

The "acqui-hire" strategy is on fire in this battle among tech titans seeking AI dominance and a Goliath just beat David

That's according to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who said on the 20VC podcast that the company's human-written code was hard to distinguish from AI-generated code. Among the company's engineers, "close to 100%" are using AI code editors, he said.

With a $2.4 billion agreement to license technology and hire top talent from AI coding startup Windsurf, Google has stepped up its efforts to dominate artificial intelligence. Varun Mohan, the CEO and co-founder of Windsurf,

Cognition CEO Scott Wu and interim Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang said they would start by integrating the AI-powered engineer Devin into Windsurf.

In a stunning reversal, Google DeepMind acquires Windsurf’s top talent just weeks after OpenAI’s $3B deal collapsed over IP tensions with Microsoft.

The move is the culmination of a turbulent period for Windsurf, and indicates that agentic IDEs have become a new battleground.