Artificial-intelligence startup Cognition AI said Monday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, the AI-powered coding platform whose leadership decamped to Google late last week. The purchase covers Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, brand and the bulk of its roughly 250-person workforce. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Windsurf recently reported about $82 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 350 enterprise customers. The deal comes only days after Google DeepMind agreed to hire Windsurf chief executive Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen and dozens of researchers, while paying roughly $2.4 billion for a non-exclusive licence to parts of Windsurf’s technology. Google took no equity in the company, executing what industry observers dubbed a “reverse acqui-hire.” Google’s move followed the collapse of OpenAI’s exclusive talks to buy Windsurf for about $3 billion. People familiar with those negotiations said Windsurf’s team raised concerns over how the startup would fit into OpenAI’s intellectual-property arrangement with Microsoft, leading the exclusivity period to expire without a deal. Cognition, valued at about $4 billion earlier this year and backed by Founders Fund, developed the autonomous coding agent Devin, which Goldman Sachs and other customers are testing. It plans to keep Windsurf’s integrated development environment running while eventually folding the technology into Devin. Cognition said all remaining Windsurf employees will receive accelerated vesting of their stock, addressing criticism that Google’s talent raid largely benefited senior executives. The rapid sequence—OpenAI’s bid, Google’s $2.4 billion talent licence and Cognition’s follow-on acquisition—underscores the escalating competition among Big Tech and well-funded startups to lock up scarce expertise in agentic coding tools, a market expected to reshape software development workflows over the next few years.