Key Windsurf figures, including CEO Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen, will join Google DeepMind to focus on agentic coding.

OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.

In the high-stakes battle for AI supremacy, Big Tech has found a new weapon: buying a company’s brainpower without buying the company itself, leaving regulators in the dust.