Cognition AI, an artificial intelligence start-up that offers a software coding assistant, said on Monday that it had bought rival Windsurf as part of an escalating battle to lead in the technology.

The move follows a $2.4 billion deal by Google to acquire some of Windsurf’s top executives and license the start-up’s technology, which was revealed on Friday. Google’s deal appeared to leave Windsurf in a difficult position as a stand-alone start-up. OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, had also been in talks to buy Windsurf before the Google deal.

“We’ve long admired the Windsurf team and what they’ve built,” said Scott Wu, a co-founder of Cognition, in an email to employees viewed by The New York Times. “Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together.”

The price of the deal could not immediately be learned.

Cognition’s move comes amid a flurry of activity by Meta, Google and OpenAI, which are racing against one another to scoop up a small pool of top technology talent in an increasingly competitive space.

Unlike the acquisition sprees that big tech companies previously embarked on, the giants are structuring these deals in an unusual way, often positioning them as investments instead of outright purchases.

In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI to hire some of Scale’s top executives and access the company’s data. Last year, Google invested $3 billion in another start-up, Character AI, in exchange for talent and technology. Amazon made a similar move with Adept, another A.I. company, about a year ago.