May 17 News.Windsurf In a blog post yesterday (May 16), the company announced the launch of its first self-developed AI software engineering modelSeries SWE-1.Covering the most powerful SWE-1, the lightweight SWE-1-lite and the streamlined SWE-1-mini.
Windsurf emphasizes that these models are specifically trained not to be limited to writing code, but to cover the complete process of software engineering and mark its transition from being a mere tool developer to a provider of the underlying technology.
Windsurf reveals that the flagship SWE-1 performs well in in-house programming tests against mainstream models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, but still falls short on software engineering tasks against cutting-edge models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
SWE-1-lite and SWE-1-mini will be available to all users of the platform for free or for a fee, while SWE-1 is restricted to paid subscribers. The company has not announced specific pricing, but claims that it costs less to operate than Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Despite rumors that OpenAI has acquired Windsurf for $3 billion, this announcement demonstrates that Windsurf is actively expanding its independent technology capabilities.