Cognition Offers Buyouts and Cuts Staff Weeks After Windsurf Acquisition, Citing “No Work-Life Balance” Mission

Just weeks after acquiring fellow AI startup Windsurf, Cognition is now offering buyout packages to its staff and has already laid off 30 employees, according to a report from The Information.

Roughly 200 employees remain, and they’ve been given until August 10 to decide whether to accept a voluntary buyout, which reportedly includes nine months of severance pay. Those who decline will face a demanding work environment: six days in the office per week and workloads exceeding 80 hours — conditions that have increasingly become the norm in the competitive AI landscape.

The development marks another twist in what has been a rocky road for Windsurf’s team. The startup was nearly absorbed by OpenAI, only to then see its co-founder, CEO, and top researchers depart for Google in a high-profile talent acquisition deal valued at $2.4 billion. That move left Windsurf effectively gutted before it was ultimately bought by Cognition three weeks ago.

At the time of the acquisition, Cognition praised Windsurf’s team as “world-class” and promised that all employees would be financially rewarded through the deal. But recent events suggest the company’s core value may have been its intellectual property, not its personnel.

In a message obtained by The Information, Cognition CEO Scott Wu made the company's position clear: “We don’t believe in work-life balance—building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two.”