JetBrains is selling independence as the rest of AI coding picks sides

JetBrains is positioning itself as the last major independent AI coding-tool vendor in a market increasingly tied to hyperscalers and foundation model labs. Speaking at Google Cloud Next, JetBrains VP of business development Mikhail Vink argued that competitors such as Microsoft Copilot, Anysphere Cursor, and Windsurf are all tied to either AI labs or cloud providers. By contrast, JetBrains says its independence allows customers to switch freely between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Cloud without being locked into one ecosystem. That flexibility underpins JetBrains’ broader AI strategy. Rather than building its own foundation model, the company is focusing on orchestration and governance through JetBrains Central, announced in March as a management layer for AI agents, usage controls, analytics, and consumption-based billing. Vink said the company’s profitability, 16 million users, and 300,000 commercial customers from its long-running IDE business have allowed it to remain venture-free and model-neutral. JetBrains argues that as developers increasingly swap between AI models, neutrality may become more valuable than owning the models themselves. Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in AI coding-tools: JetBrains ‘Agentic’ AI Agent Helps Automate Coding Tasks https://thenewstack.io/jetbrains-agentic-ai-assistant-helps-automate-coding-tasks/ JetBrains: AI agents are about to repeat the cloud ROI crisis https://thenewstack.io/jetbrains-central-ai-agents/ JetBrains names the debt AI agents leave behind https://thenewstack.io/jetbrains-names-the-debt-ai-agents-leave-behind/ Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. https://thenewstack.io/newsletter