Windsurf, and its Cascade agent, launched under Codeium back in November 2024, and I've used it on and off since. Most of what I'd normally write about here, what it secures, what it doesn't, is a fairly ordinary story. What makes Windsurf worth a slightly different post is that last year the company itself went through something genuinely unusual, and I think the ownership side of the story matters as much as the code side for anyone deciding what to build on.
The straightforward part
Cascade builds and edits code through natural-language instructions, similar in spirit to the other agentic tools I've covered. Around the end of May last year, a vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-62353 was disclosed affecting Windsurf, Cursor, and MCP-related tooling more broadly. MCP, the protocol a lot of these agents use to connect to external tools and data sources, was still a relatively new integration point at the time, and new integration points are exactly where I'd expect a first round of real vulnerabilities to surface, simply because fewer people have had time to stress-test them yet.
The part that actually surprised me
In the middle of July last year, Windsurf's ownership situation became genuinely chaotic within the space of about a week. OpenAI had reportedly been close to a roughly three billion dollar acquisition, which fell apart over an intellectual-property conflict with Microsoft. Google then stepped in with a very different kind of deal, paying around 2.4 billion dollars to license Windsurf's technology and hire away its CEO, without acquiring the company itself. Cognition, the team behind the Devin agent, then acquired what remained of Windsurf, the company, the product, and the brand, that same week.
Why this matters for a security-and-trust post at all
I don't think of company ownership as a security vulnerability in the technical sense. I do think it's a real, practical risk category that's easy to ignore when you're only thinking about code. If you build a business on a tool, and that tool's underlying company changes hands, gets partially absorbed, or has its core team hired away, in the span of a single week, that's a genuine continuity question: will this product still exist in its current form in a year, will support and security patching continue at the same pace, does the team that understands its internals still work there. None of that shows up in a code scan. All of it affects whether the tool you're depending on will still be dependable.
What I'd actually suggest
- Treat vendor stability as a real category, alongside code-level security, when choosing a tool to build a real business on, not just a side project.
- Keep an eye on public reporting about the platforms you depend on, the same way you'd watch for a security advisory, since ownership changes can move just as fast.
- Avoid building anything with hard, unremovable lock-in to a single vendor's proprietary format if you're choosing between comparable options, precisely because a week like last July can happen to any of them.
- For the code side specifically, keep an eye on advisories tied to newer integration points like MCP, since that's exactly the kind of feature most likely to have more findings surface as it matures.
The vulnerability got disclosed and, presumably, addressed the way these things usually go. The ownership story is the one still unfolding, and it's a reminder that 'is this tool secure' and 'is this tool a stable thing to build a business on' are related questions, but they're not the same one.