The dispute has expanded to include investor Vinod Khosla, whose firm led Factory's Series C but who described the company as a "struggling second tier competitor" according to reports from Forbes. Internal conflict also persists over the timeline of Degnan's departure; Grinberg provided emails showing Degnan was fired at 6:48 PM PT on Sept 29, while Cognition partner Russell Kaplan claims Grinberg only attacked Degnan's reputation after he rejected a full-time offer to remain at Factory. Meanwhile, Factory highlights its own growth, noting its team increased 10x in size and revenue grew 100x year over year.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
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VulcanBench Drops Cognition AI Results After Ethics Row With Factory
AI20 days ago
The creator of VulcanBench has scrubbed all performance results for Cognition's SWE-2 model and stopped evaluating the Devin harness following an ethics row with rival Factory. Morgan Linton's decision to remove the benchmarks stems from a belief in allegations made by Factory CEO Matan Grinberg, who claims Cognition targeted insiders and used fake interviews to obtain proprietary data. The conflict centers on the hiring of Chris Degnan, the first sales rep at Snowflake who helped scale that firm to $3B in ARR, as Cognition's Chief Revenue Officer after Factory terminated his advisory roles on September 29.
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