OpenAI sought Anysphere deal before turning its sights on WindSurf

OpenAI reportedly attempted to acquire Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor AI coding assistant, in 2024 and 2025, but talks stalled both times. This led OpenAI to explore other acquisition opportunities, including a potential $3 billion deal with WindSurf. The attempted acquisition follows the release of DeepSeek R1, an AI model that achieved comparable performance to leading models at a fraction of the cost. This development has challenged the assumption that scaling AI requires massive computing power and has raised questions about the billions spent by US AI giants. OpenAI expects to triple its revenue in 2025 to $12.7 billion by selling paid subscriptions for its AI models. The company has surpassed 1 million premium business subscribers, but CEO Sam Altman says OpenAI may not be profitable until 2029, requiring revenues of approximately $125 billion. Altman notes that AI development costs are dropping dramatically, with the cost to use a given level of AI falling about 10x every 12 months. However, high costs and centralization issues continue to plague large-scale corporate AI developers, who must compete with more nimble open-source counterparts. The release of DeepSeek has solidified open-source AI as a serious contender against centralized AI systems, proving that AI does not need billions of dollars to scale or achieve high-performance benchmarks.