In August 2025, just three weeks after acquiring the AI coding startup Windsurf, Cognition AI laid off 30 employees and offered buyouts to the roughly 200 remaining staff. This move, affecting a significant portion of the team, reveals that Cognition's primary interest was Windsurf's intellectual property rather than its talent, despite earlier assurances of retaining employees. The layoffs and stringent buyout conditions, including demands for over 80-hour work weeks, mark another turbulent chapter for Windsurf, which had previously faced a failed acquisition by OpenAI and a major talent exodus to Google.
