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Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

852 points by meetpateltech 19d ago

hargup 19d ago
Bummed, but I guess for me, doesn't mean cursor subscription ending though. Grok is a pretty amazing model for the speed and price on Cursor.
- hackernud3s 19d ago
  Does Grok have a subscription that competes with Claude Max $100 plan (genuinely curious)
  - maipen 19d ago
    Yes it does. You can either subscribe to grok directly or cursor. You have many tiers and all of them have generous usage. Grok is a workhorse, not the smartest yet, but produces good code and follows the plan. Grok 5, which has been training since beginnig of this year, will probably be a monster. (10T/6T Param model variants)
  - Jcampuzano2 19d ago
    Yes, any Cursor sub includes a separate tier of usage for Cursor/SpaceX first party models separate from usage of third party models. I have a $20 Cursor sub still personally and would say that the usage for Grok models is much higher than what $20 gets you with Anthropic. I can't speak for the $100 plan but I would assume it scales similarly. I rarely run out of my usage monthly even with the $20 plan.
    - mgcross 19d ago
      I'm on the $20 plan too and the only time I run over is if I'm using Opus (or probably other third-party models). Grok and Composer seem nearly free at this point. Cursor also gave me a $100 credit for Grok after 81% of my usage was on TP models. I don't think Grok 4.6 is quite at the level of Opus 5, but it's close and so much faster (and less chatty).
  - thefourthchime 18d ago
    It's a little confusing because Grok and Cursor kinda live in different worlds. Grok has SuperGrok and SuperGrok Heavy ($300 a month!) The best bet is Cursor Ultra ($200), which is the equivalent a month plan that you get from OpenAI and Anthropic. I get a LOT more capacity out of it because I almost always use the "Auto" mode, which auto picks between Opus 5, GPT 5.6, Grok 4.6, and Composer 2.5. I like Auto mode so much actually. I use it for my Cursor work account as well because it's about 10x faster than just using Opus 5 or GPT 5.6 and about 90% is good. I switch back to the bigger models if I get in trouble, but that's pretty rare. Vibe coding requires some discipline. You need understand what it's trying to do. If you have a good mental model you can keep it out of trouble. If you don't, it doesn't matter how good the model is. You're gonna end up in a mess.
swader999 19d ago
Can't cursor just use open router? This might backfire on them and push more money to second tier good enough models.
daemon_9009 11d ago
It's just the beef between musk and Altman, nothing to do with the models.
sidcool 19d ago
This is personal, not business.
throwitaway222 19d ago
Makes sense.
demibabs 19d ago
Wow, I don’t use cursor but that seems pretty bad for them. Is there a way to work around this (like using your OpenAI limits directly?)
- charrondev 19d ago
  I used cursor extensively both at work and for personal use. Its harness is pretty darn good but I basically never used OpenAI models in it. The first party cursor models (initially composer and now grok-cursor) and price very competitively for their quality and have very generous usage limits included in the base plans, and then per token pricing afterwards. Occasionally I’ve used some of the Anthropic models in it but found their cost massively outweighed the benefits for the type of usage we do. I was using Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6 for a while but the newer models are a lot more expensive at the per-token pricing.
- auscompgeek 19d ago
  Cursor does currently allow users to BYO OpenAI token. Given Cursor won't have access to OpenAI models for prompt engineering/evals though, there's definitely a question of whether they'd allow picking any new OpenAI models, assuming the BYOK option continues to exist at all.
  - Maxious 19d ago
    Email to customers now "We’re speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this, and we will share more in the coming weeks around continuity of access to OpenAI models. We’ll continue to offer ways to access all models in Cursor.
- ralusek 19d ago
  It's basically not going to affect them at all. I don't know a single person that uses OpenAI models via Cursor. Saw another comment say it was 5%.
  - hirako2000 19d ago
    All it shows is that openai is likely still subsidizing inference, sees no value in integration buried within other branded tooling competing with theirs.
Jcampuzano2 19d ago
It was honestly just a matter of time, given all of the bad blood there is between Sam and Elon and Elon basically admitting under oath they were distilling other companies models. I wonder if Anthropic will follow suit given their campaign against distillation or if they'll stay quiet given their reliance on SpaceX (among others) for hardware.
Y0s 19d ago
So Astra release Friday 13th November!?
- Jcampuzano2 19d ago
  The way I read the article was that they will continue providing their current models, but won't let them use any newer ones announced even between now and the end date. But I might be wrong. > we’ve decided to hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor.
bentt 19d ago
While this isn't great for users it seems like a pretty standard circling of the wagons in preparation for the next phase in the battle for frontier AI dominance. Ironically, as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic. I don't feel good about giving OpenAI money directly, but I've found switching to GPT 5.6 Sol now and again in Cursor to be useful. Now I'll probably just forget about OpenAI models.
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
- reilly3000 19d ago
  I think they are betting that Astra will be impossible to ignore.
  - SoftTalker 19d ago
    For three months, until the next SOTA model drops. And with each improved model, the number of people who actually need it declines.
    - ronsor 19d ago
      Exactly. Astra will likely get its Mythos moment, and then another Chinese lab releases its equivalent three months later while Anthropic releases a newer, better model.
      - dakolli 19d ago
        There's a reason why most businesses don't hire PhDs, they dont need it. PhDs are cheap in many countries, arguably more affordable than a full time mythos lvl agent, yet businesses in India still don't hire 30k a year PhDs to run their businesses. Its simply not necessary. AI labs have lost the plot from a business perspective. If chasing ASI is the goal, that also seems stupid.. Putting all of your customers out of business with ASI doesn't really lead to great outcomes either. They're commodity fetishism maxxing.
redox99 19d ago
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans. Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
- dancemethis 19d ago
  I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with. Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
  - dakolli 19d ago
    Couldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality? I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
    - raincole 19d ago
      You can just pirate Adobe's software and their marketcap is 115.88B.
    - natdempk 19d ago
      Cursor charges the “Cursor Token Rate” for BYOK https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate
      - sourcecodeplz 19d ago
        No. Its is not for bring your own key. It is for 3rd party models (which you get double the amount of your sub price as usage). Of course they wont charge you extra for BYOK. how would they???
satvikpendem 19d ago
If you have such a world changing technology, why sell an API when you can capture all the value yourself? That's what every provider is asking themselves. Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.
- CoolestBeans 19d ago
  Being a pure play model provider is completely untenable right now. Coding agents own your demand; Nvidia, data centers, and DRAM manufacturers own your supply. You're getting squeezed by open weight models. Your only bet to making money off this thing is by locking your model down to your program to have some semblance of a moat. The fact that businesses can change providers with just the change of an API key is unsustainable. You have neither the "hard to switch" lock-in of a traditional software company nor do you have the near-zero marginal cost of production they have. Each token of inference costs you money, not to mention the training costs. At least locking the models down to your harness lets you get some sort of lock-in.
  - iamflimflam1 19d ago
    Lots of enterprises don’t want to use OpenAI or Anthropic directly. They will go via AWS bedrock or google’s equivalent. The model providers are in a difficult position. With an added danger of open weight models that are within reach of large enterprises running themselves.
closetheloopdev 19d ago
> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms. This move seems to protect Astra against distillation. I wonder whether Astra will be released before or after 11/12.
- mattnewton 19d ago
  Before, but they say that they’re also not going to provide astra to cursor subscribers
ananmays 19d ago
> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms. I think Sam Altman has played a clever business move here, they can use this excuse immediately after the Hugging Face leaks and it's not going to be dismissed willy-nilly. Whereas long term they probably wanted to end their partnership with Cursor anyway. I bet Dario will be happy about this too, but maybe the compute deal prevents him from doing similar anytime soon. Very interesting times we live in...
- semiquaver 19d ago
  Is it really an excuse? As the release points out, musk admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI’s models to produce xai models on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think about goose for the gander wrt IP theft, I wouldn’t voluntarily do business with a competitor who was actively and brazenly flouting my terms, would you?
  - userbinator 19d ago
    It's amusingly ironic to talk about "IP theft" in the context of AI models.
    - semiquaver 19d ago
      Shorthand. I agree it’s hypocritical and theft isn’t the right word, but we make do with the words we have.
  - aeternum 19d ago
    OpenAI's models are distilled from your HN posts
    - semiquaver 18d ago
      Quite sure I covered that aspect, thanks.
__initbrian__ 19d ago
they’ll see an uptick in codex user count trying the new models and can build a narrative around that too
AnonHP 19d ago
My guess is that OpenAI now has a full blown Cursor equivalent in development (an expansion of Codex?) and will announce it in September. Otherwise it stands to lose those who are used to working with Cursor.
- wheelhead 19d ago
  Yeah, the "go above and beyond for our users" implies they have a "better" version of Cursor coming. Probably integrating their new chip/microphone based product.
- Maxious 19d ago
  OpenAI acquired Ona in June https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/ https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/
- tomr75 19d ago
  codex is already great.. cursor is just a competing harness codex growth at 20mill now, prob more cost effective to allocate that compute to people directly paying now
noodletheworld 19d ago
Days until cursor announces open models… 3, 2, 1… Seriously though, when the api providers start blacklisting cursor and they’re forced to swap to open weight models… If that happens, what even is the difference between openrouter and cursor?
- alphabettsy 19d ago
  They already have open models. https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing
- skeledrew 19d ago
  Well, one has a pretty popular harness.
  - yomu123 19d ago
    sure?
- alberth 19d ago
  You assume OpenAI doesn’t turn off access to OpenRouter too. Strategically, OpenAI long-term will want to own the direct relationship with all their customers. As will most major AI labs.
dgrin91 19d ago
Not surprised, but honestly I don't feel like this is a huge loss for cursor. Models are so commoditized, and 99% of users don't need particularly fancy models. Between existing anthropic models, composer-2, honestly even grok models, and also the fact that many people just use 'auto' mode, I feel like many won't feel the impact for OpenAI's withdrawal. Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For better or worse though, Xai seems like its lining themselves up to handle being on their own for cursor.
- thefourthchime 18d ago
  Agree, I use Auto 90% of the time. I doubt I'll tell the difference.
skeledrew 19d ago
> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts. > After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke (opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others). I have never seen one large company throw another large company under the bus without any legalese filters like this before. Wondering if OpenAI site got pwned. Or maybe we in some strange, alternative reality. I doubt even their LLMs would be this frank.
- the_real_cher 19d ago
  Sam and Elon have a long standing feud. This is more than just bad blood between companies.
  - skeledrew 19d ago
    Still, where's the legalese? I'd expect something like this on an individual's blog, not a company's.
    - mikeyouse 19d ago
      They can skip the legalese because Musk had testified under oath that Grok was distilling OpenAI models while Elon was on the board of OpenAI. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/921546/elon-musk-xai-openai-trial-model-distillation https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/921546/e...
      - 293725903 18d ago
        [dead]
- AirMax98 19d ago
  And to announce it on a Friday night. Brutal.
- Palmik 19d ago
gexla 19d ago
I don't see how it makes sense to use models outside of Grok or Composer in cursor unless you like the tooling to such degree that you're willing to pay out the nose for access to OpenAI and Anthropic to use with that tooling. And Codex is regularly scoring towards the top among harnesses, so you might as well use the best harness available for the given model. I'm happy with Grok and Composer in Cursor. If Cursor wants to add more models, they should host more open models.
- herrvogel- 19d ago
  Is there a good place for harness comparison/scoring?
  - reilly3000 19d ago
    https://www.harness-bench.ai/leaderboard.html https://www.harness-bench.ai/leaderboard.html This provides a method, but the data looks stale and perhaps a bit thin compared to say, Cursor, or even AntiGravity data.
    - alainchabat 19d ago
      never heard of nanobot. how reliable is this benchmark?
      - reilly3000 19d ago
        I can’t speak to the veracity of the benchmarks but it appears their methodology is sound. Nanobot has 47k stars, fwiw https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot It has been more of an OpenClaw or Hermes alternative than a coding agent like OpenCode or Pi, so it’s likely to do well given less context bloat.
      - cheeze 19d ago
        IMO it's not. It's benchmarking GPT 5.4 and Opus 4.6. It's also missing Claude Code... one of the most popular harnesses (the most?)
Philpax 19d ago
Honestly, can't say I miss my Cursor subscription at all, and I'm surprised they're still a going concern. Why would I want to use a proprietary VSCode fork with an identity crisis when I can use literally any editor with any agent and have about the same experience?
- disgruntledphd2 19d ago
  The integrated review UI is super helpful, but apparently nobody reviews code anymore except me.
  - dexterlagan 19d ago
    I use Claude Code (both Desktop and CLI) all day every day (as well as OpenCode with DeepSeek V4 among others). For non-mission-critical stuff (small internal tools, anything that doesn't touch the client and doesn't handle critical data or infra), I'm on Auto (sandboxed in the working directory). For everything else I approve every change, meaning I review every code change the model proposes. Plan mode is great to write the architecture as well, as it doesn't touch any file, doesn't write anything, and lets me iterate until the arch is perfect and the proposed high-level code (modules etc) is solid. I haven't used an editor in over 4 years, apart from writing specs.
    - disgruntledphd2 18d ago
      How do you review the code? I can use git to see changes, but it's super annoying to tell the agent file line plus comment for each change, so I catch less stuff early which seems to compound.
      - beckhamc 17d ago
        This may be of use to you, I wrote a similar reply earlier in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49486172#49491426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49486172#49491426
    - danielhorilla 18d ago
bix6 19d ago
Why would they give the maximum time instead of the minimum given violation has already occurred?
- riffraff 19d ago
  Because it doesn't matter anymore for current models and they want to show goodwill, probably.
thoughtpeddler 19d ago
Spend a lot of time thinking about why individuals shouldn't trust large AI cos, now it's interesting getting to think about how the AI companies themselves don't trust each other. Capitalism is viciously cold and uncaring.
- gnarlouse 19d ago
  At least capitalism isn't at the center of the most impactful technological revolution in human history.
  - blackqueeriroh 19d ago
    Yeah, that’s mostly been driven by socialism
  - thoughtpeddler 19d ago
    Not sure the larger point you're trying to make (maybe we're on the same page?), but it's a fact that AI has come from heavy long-term investments by the academic and public sectors, yet private companies are accruing most of the gains
    - atmosx 19d ago
      The iPhone too, etc. These ppl, who think Capitalism as a religion in a couple of years will be singing another tune with the same reassurances. The movie Goya’s Ghost explains this in great detail.
- fhn 19d ago
  show me a communist country
  - timmmmmmay 19d ago
    back when the USSR was still a going concern, there were zero American leftists claiming that it wasn't really communist. that only started happening after they failed
pinkmuffinere 19d ago
> We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them. Do I smell a cursor-analogue from openAI?
rgbrenner 19d ago
Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models. This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider. It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.
- frankacter 19d ago
  Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use. That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling. >"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
  - rgbrenner 19d ago
    Cursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access-to-claude/ https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access... And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropic-cuts-windsurfs-claude-access-before-openai-acquisition/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi... So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
    - frankacter 18d ago
      Again neither of those links indicated usage that violate TOS beyond being a major competitor. They indiacte their development staff are using it, and they access it via API, then then go on to say all the nefarious things they "could" be doing, stopping before stating they actually are. Specifically the TOS violation was: >customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service" So if you are building a competitive product, that alone is a TOS violation from their perspective. Which is fine and their prerogative, but we shouldn't cast a dark cloud suggesting other violations were happening without stated evidence. OpenAI publicly stated they can't "trust that xAI will use it within terms" not even that they've violated, not that there has been a violation from the Cursor team. https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in-decision-to-drop-cursor-partnership/ https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in... >OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service"
iJohnDoe 19d ago
I guess I’m on the right track. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835 If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.
- dumbmrblah 19d ago
  Grok? Google? I'm not a fan of Elon, nor do I use Cursor, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't the only models.
- ralusek 19d ago
  Cursor is like one of the least economical ways to use Claude and OpenAI, virtually nobody does it. You use Cursor for their autocomplete/composer + grok. For using Claude and Codex, you get immeasurably more bang for your buck just using them directly.
  - Synthetic7346 19d ago
    Not in enterprise
- brightball 19d ago
  I've been using Cursor with Grok 4.6 a lot over the last week or so. Grok Build as well. Both options are performing very well for me.
  - therealdrag0 19d ago
    Ya I was slow to try Grok but I’m now happy with it.
- iJohnDoe 19d ago
  All good points. However, it's not a safe assumption that everyone operates that way. People probably use the flagship models because that's what they know. Sure, some probably just use the default, in this case Grok. Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok. Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.
killerdog10 19d ago
[dead]
simontlbt 19d ago
OpenAI / Sam Altman is probably even shadier than musk
- s1n_ 19d ago
  “Satan is probably even shadier than Beelzebub”
- DarmokTanagra 19d ago
  No love for Sama, but Musk is bond villain levels of shady. The man is an outright existential threat to democracy.
ergocoder 19d ago
Cursor founder just tweeted that he was sad to see this ban and that OpenAI model represented around 5% of total usage. Burn.
- corentin88 19d ago
  Source?
  - ergocoder 18d ago
    A Cursor CEO's tweet.
- fsh 19d ago
  That's probably a lot more than their market share versus Claude Code and Codex.
- cactusplant7374 19d ago
  Codex has 20+ million users. They are doing much better than Cursor.
- ralph84 19d ago
  5% of traffic. OpenAI models are a much higher percentage of revenue.
  - deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
- dbbk 19d ago
  Not really a surprise given their own models are the default option? Most people wouldn't change model. And if you want to use Claude or GPT you don't really have a reason to use Cursor over Claude Code or Codex
- ncr100 19d ago
  Is this spite?
charcircuit 19d ago
What happened to researchers embracing the open research culture of improving on the results of others?
ChannelFence 19d ago
this is a pretty clean test of whether people were buying cursor or just using it for convenient access to whichever model was flavor of the week. i work in qa so i'm naturally wary of adding another critical dependency to a development workflow, if the model you actually want can just disappear because two vendor change ownership or start argueing then the wrapper has to be really good on its own. cursors harness and its own models may be good enough that users stay, and if they do cursor has a moat at least. if everyone follows the openai models out the door, it will just become a polished ui.
- pianopatrick 19d ago
  I use Cursor because I listened to YouTube interviews with the teams behind most of these products and I trusted their team the most.
  - iamleppert 19d ago
    How TF do you trust people you don’t know from YouTube interviews? You don’t know them. They are strangers to you trying to sell you something.
    - pianopatrick 18d ago
      Yeah, well that's the same as all the other AI companies isn't it
est 19d ago
Models are now having much tighter integration with harness. It's gunna to happen anyway. We are sailing into the age of vertically integrated intelligence.
benatkin 19d ago
It's going to be tough for Origin, their code hosting platform, to follow in the footsteps of GitHub, if they can't be treated as a neutral party.
chr15m 19d ago
Allowing the company or harness to dictate which models you use is crazy.
nunez 19d ago
Damn; Cursor has basically no value if Anthropic pulls the same move. Twitter Part 2 indeed.
- arcanemachiner 19d ago
  Anthropic rents a lot of capacity from xAI, so I don't think they're in a position to do the same.
  - shye 19d ago
    Anthropic already stopped selling use of their models to xAI when they suspect foul play there.
- throw03172019 19d ago
  I’d be canceling for sure Grok is a huge joke and consistently destroys my Clojure files.
- hirako2000 19d ago
  How so? A dozen very capable models out there. And the gap between frontier models from the two main US labs kept narrowing, at this point non existent. The quality/price ratio is clearly superior when running Qwen, GLM, or Deepseek. To make a product more exclusive won't hide the fact that product is becoming more and more irrelevant.
  - andy_ppp 19d ago
    Most people do not enjoy the output of the open models or know where their code is being sent so I’m out. Also I don’t trust Elon anyway, I’m just going to make a VS Code Extension that handles things how I want but I’d like to offer the same deals Cursor got for tokens with OpenAI and Anthropic, for me this was the key 1/4 token cost!
moomoo11 19d ago
i don't see the point of cursor when vsc + codex extension does the same thing. i don't use autocomplete anymore (who writes code anymore? lol) any and anyone using grok unironically is also probably a moron. i only tell VC type people or others from whom i want something "oh yeah grok is cool" if they mention it, because they're always sucking off Elon
akmarinov 19d ago
This low key confirms Astra for November
GMoromisato 19d ago
Everyone is playing hardball. No one wants to be IBM in an IBM-Microsoft dance. But this is kind of like banning GPU exports to China. It will encourage them to develop their own technology. Yes, it will take them longer, but in the long-run China will be more successful with their own GPU tech. The same could be true of SpaceX/xAI
- clarkqaq 13d ago
  So now you know why Trump is called "川建国 (Chuan Jianguo)" in China — literally "Trump who builds China" — because he really is building China and making it better (just kidding).
- johnnyApplePRNG 19d ago
  LOL You had me until: >The same could be true of a company run by a drug addict. Elon Musk is nowhere near as capable as millions of intelligent developers in China.
  - inigyou 19d ago
    He doesn't have to be. He just has to hire millions of intelligent developers in China.
    - johnnyApplePRNG 19d ago
      Except legally and structurally, he can't: ITAR: SpaceX is strictly barred by US federal law from hiring non-US persons for aerospace engineering. National Security Scrutiny: xAI operates under increasing US export and tech-transfer controls regarding China. Scale: A private company's recruiting budget cannot compete with the sovereign industrial capacity and state-backed talent pipeline of an entire nation.
- angusturner 19d ago
  What unique differentiator could musk possibly offer though? Is there really a high demand for racist chatbots with no safety controls? And even if there is, will governments even allow it to keep operating?
rolymath 19d ago
Feels like scam altam writes the openai blog posts himself. The way Musk is brought up feels very 'mean girl'y
rippeltippel 19d ago
I may be a rare Cursor user around here, but I am saddened by this news. The thing that keeps me using it is precisely the ability to switch between models: I usually do brainstorm/planning with Sol or Terra, then let Composer (free) deal with the implementation. For certain tasks I use Claude, which tends to be more expensive but sometimes saves me time. Using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Cursor is cheaper than having two separate subscriptions, and their free tier of Composer is good enough. I will now have to reconsider my options.
- idrissbellil 19d ago
  It's very easy to achieve that and more with: Crush (or Opencode) + OpenRouter right from the terminal. Takes a minute to setup.
  - mmastrac 19d ago
    If you can explain how to make compaction not suck in opencode or Kilo Code, I would love to know how. I am really trying to make use of other harnesses but that's a major sticking point.
    - 9dev 19d ago
      Never compact. Not automatically, not manually. Instead, let it write ledgers and checklists or handover prompt if necessary, and start fresh sessions as often as possible.
      - dannyw 19d ago
        What do you do for long-running goals / tasks where you are not interactively prompting?
        9dev 19d ago
        Create a design spec and implementation plan first. If necessary, split that in phases. Then create a ledger that always holds the current status, and instruct the model to update that after it completes a task in the plan, and to append any issues it encounters during the implementation. Then you can let it run, and when it stops, point a fresh session to the ledger to pick up the work from where the previous one left off. You can get more fancy by using something like GitHub issues for coordination too and have multiple sessions create issues and epics and others to work on that in isolated worktrees, but the spec-plan-ledger approach usually works great for small to medium large projects.
saos 19d ago
They were going to do this regardless of SpaceX.
tonyhart7 19d ago
pot calling kettle black
fy20 19d ago
At my dayjob we are big users of Cursor's Cloud Agents. We use them to trigger automated investigations customer support issues, alarms, feature requests etc. The Cursor editor is fairly meh in comparison, but this has become a big part of our workflow. And having anyone on our team manage them. What competing products are there we should try?
- dregitsky 19d ago
  Devin Automations is the most obvious one: solid UX, but can get very expensive to run. There are also a bunch of newer startups in this space. I'm building one myself, https://boxes.dev https://boxes.dev -- we're very early but building for this exact use case. Some other ones worth a look are Factory Droid and Amp Orbs. Those two build their own agent harness (like Cursor), whereas with boxes.dev we run the native codex and claude code harnesses directly.
deleted 19d ago
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kaiji1126 19d ago
[flagged]
neya 19d ago
We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts. The pot calling the kettle black. Look who's talking. A company that trained it's models illegally on so many copyrighted materials without compensating anyone involved. For a company named "Open" AI, they've been hardly open at all and the slew of resignations of top tier execs in the company is really the proof. Make no mistake, this isn't a moral decision. This is just killing the competition using morality as an excuse.
- armcat 19d ago
  Codex cli is open source rust project (Claude Code is not). Whisper is an open weight ASR/STT model. GPT-OSS is an open weight LLM that can run locally and is still very capable. CLIP is an open source model used for image encoding. Just some of the open contributions from OpenAI
  - neya 19d ago
    All these were released way late for a company called "Open" AI. But go on, keep defending the billion dollar corporation.
- inigyou 19d ago
  Correct. It's killing the competition. Which is what you should do if you want to run a successful business.
  - neya 19d ago
    Then don't be pretentious and frame it as a morality statement. Just call it what it is.
    - inigyou 19d ago
      Framing your competition killing as morality is also something you should do to be successful.
Palmik 19d ago
Elon Musk openly admitted to distilling OpenAI's models [1], which I think explains the "based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts". Last year, Anthropic cut off Windsurf the same way [2]. Fortunately, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI allows you to use your subscription with other harnesses, including Cursor. Of course today, Anthropic is taking the "high road" and is OK with with SpaceX [3] including their models in Cursor, because they need SpaceX's compute. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elon-musk-admits-xai-distilled-openai-data-to-train-models-heres-what-that-means/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is-limiting-its-direct-access-to-claude-ai-models/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is... [3] https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657 https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657
- elil17 19d ago
  More generally, Musk admittedly works with a "move fast and break things" mentality. His companies have repeatedly broken environmental laws, labor laws, and securities laws. His companies often fail to deliver the features they promise and routinely miss deadlines they've committed to. They routinely violate contracts that they have agreed to. Not doing business with them is a completely normal and unremarkable decision.
wodenokoto 19d ago
> we are giving the maximum notice provided by our contract. Anyone else surprised that the maximum notice period allowed is about 3 months? I would have thought 3 months is minimum notice period, with provisions to stop faster if any provable violation occurs.
- elil17 19d ago
  It makes no sense that a contract would even provide a maximum notice period. Why would parties put that in? What benefit would either derive from restricting themselves to not getting earlier notice.
  - aroman 19d ago
    I read it as: we acted as quickly as we could once it became possible to do so, i.e., the change in control was completed. not that their special agreement carved out some maximum notice term.
- Kubuxu 19d ago
  From the article, it seems they using a clause allowing them to terminate the contract after transfer of ownership. This clause probably has a expiry date and they are saying “we are trying not to be jerks here by waiting until the last second to trigger it”.
- hn1986 18d ago
  3 months is a long time in AI world
armcat 19d ago
Does this also apply to API endpoints, let’s say if you want to provide API keys in Cursor to Azure or Bedrock deployment of a GPT model?
- post-it 19d ago
  I can't imagine it would.
yomu123 19d ago
helloooo
woggy 19d ago
Why maximum notice? Why not minimum notice? Elon doesn't deserve more than that.
- iamflimflam1 19d ago
  They need time to build a cursor equivalent.
  - deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
- gverrilla 19d ago
  I agree Elon deserved that, but there are users involved too.
mcintyre1994 19d ago
This seems like a no brainer, not sure how Cursor would expect to be trusted by any other company now that they’re owned by SpaceX.
- whamlastxmas 19d ago
  I trust them more than someone who took a nonprofit designed to be open and had tens of millions in donations to do just that, and then turned into a for profit who's cuddled up tight with Microsoft and is so closed they're preemptively ending contracts with someone under pretty flimsy accusations. And doubly funny it's the person who's responsible for them even existing. And from whom they stole tens of millions
- thefourthchime 18d ago
  I really get sick of this anti-Elon rhetoric around here. Can we not keep it to technical merits and not get sucked up into politics? The guy's clearly nuts, but he's also done an incredible amount of amazing things.
  - Anamon 16d ago
    This isn't a technical article, though. It's about contracts, so one party's self-admitted habit of ignoring contractual obligations seems very relevant and not a random ad hominem.
armcat 19d ago
You can still use it via API keys (answering my own question from earlier), https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343774?s=46 https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343774?s=46
- gempir 19d ago
  The last time I tried an API Key in Cursor they limited it to the very basic Ask mode. No Agent Mode. So this is very much useless if still the case
dozerly 19d ago
Any tool that tightly couples you to an inference provider is a sub-par tool and destined to be forgotten.
tanepiper 19d ago
What a shame for Cursor. I found it a great tool - I actually liked Composer 2.5; but now being bought by SpaceX has for a while left a bad taste - and they keep pushing Grok and now GrokBot. I took the 50% discount instead of cancelling - but with this I'll likely not renew. So sad to watch them go from great to mediocre in such a short time.
- tkel 19d ago
  Perhaps now they'll release a 3.0 MechaHitler version
- ctrlkctrls 18d ago
  Didn't Kamprad have some pretty strong ties to the Nazi party? Yet you have a bad taste in your mouth because Cursor gets bought by SpaceX! Virtue signaling in glass houses...
  - tanepiper 18d ago
    Sorry why are you mentioning Nazis? I didn't - I think the lady sockpuppet doth protest too much...
chrisrickard 19d ago
damn... cursor doesn't get as much love as claude code or codex (on here anyways), but honestly, it's gotten amazing in the last 6 months. i loved switching between sol / fable / grok 4.5. ... and something tells me fable might not be available on cursor for much longer :/
- simondotau 18d ago
  Try kimi k3, for code review at least. I think it’s significantly better than Sol and Anthropic for analysis, if you care about your code.
jackjeff 19d ago
Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms - fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg - in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small - in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by hand. It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor. Also I find that incredibly slow. By the time Claude finished a prompt I could have done a few in cursor. And mind you, I’ve been wanting to use zed instead but the clunky vscode fork called cursor. But cursor has just a better UX for AI integration even though it’s slow and guzzle up RAM.
- BrokenCogs 19d ago
  Vs code copilot is the same or better than cursor in my opinion - I mean that's where cursor comes from
  - Sammi 18d ago
    I just switched back to VS Code from Cursor a week ago. Things seem great and VS Code has caught up. Last time I tried switching back was in November and VS Code was not ready then.
  - minhaz23 18d ago
    Is this the chat on the side or the agents feature?
    - BrokenCogs 18d ago
      The chat on the side can use agents too
- dools 19d ago
  Check out JetBrains Air
dools 19d ago
When I was bringing up IDEs at work and advocating JetBrains (I’ve since built my own … ) a colleague questioned why we don’t just use cursor instead of waiting for JetBrains Air to come out. The products are basically equivalent but JetBrains is a profitable bootstrapped company that has been building IDEs for 20 years and Cursor is a flash in the pan startup with a squillion dollar valuation to support. Sooner or later they’re going to do something that will fuck their users over. And selling to SpaceX was it!
vachina 19d ago
Auto and Grok is pretty good. As a casual user OpenAI models are expensive for the marginal (or none if at all) step up in performance.
zyralab 19d ago
Kinda crazy how fast things can change after an acquisition If your coding tool depends on other companies’ AI models, one business decision can suddenly change the whole product
Jeeetendra 19d ago
This is the platform risk of building on rented intelligence. Cursor’s moat now has to be its harness and true model portability—not privileged access to any one AI lab.
qaq 19d ago
I mean, given Sam and Elon’s relationship, I don’t think anyone is surprised.
jimnotgym 19d ago
Can I suppose that Cursor, by seeing everyones prompts and all of the responses from the models, are in a position to sort of MITM distill them?
- pnt12 19d ago
  Yes, and given it's now owned by Elon Musk, who is not trustworthy, it's possible he would try to do it. Although I wouldn't take an Openai announcement literally, as Sam Altman is also not trustworthy.
- maipen 19d ago
  Unless you run your models and harness completely locally, you can't verify your data isn't being used. All of these companies, and I truly mean all, stole data to train their models.
- paxys 18d ago
  Musk was forced to admit under oath during his OpenAI lawsuit that xAI distilled GPT models to train Grok. No reason to believe he won't use Cursor data for the same thing, if it isn't happening already.
zoobab 19d ago
So much for 'open'.
throwaw12 19d ago
Something deep inside me is saying this is good for us, because Cursor will try harder to train better coding models to stay afloat.
sajithdilshan 19d ago
I think there is still a huge market for models that are specialised in software development (system design, infrastructure, coding, etc.). If a company can provide the access to such a model via AWS Bedrock or similar enterprise compliant platform with a decent IDE/harness they can capture billions of dollars of market. The closest we have to this is Claude Code but I think it can even be better and specialised. Cursor has an enormous amount of data on coding and developer usage and maybe they should use that to build a proper platform
formvoltron 19d ago
Good! I don't consider myself a Nazi and so I'm happy a big, influential tech company refuses to business with a man who does the Nazi salute on television.
WesolyKubeczek 19d ago
[flagged]
shevy-java 19d ago
The billionaires buy up key technology now. I don't like this.
robeym 19d ago
I think the entire purpose of the acquisition was just to buy a chunk of the market for their own models. Curious to see if Musk responds.
docmars 19d ago
I guess they don't like money, because Cursor is really good and offers a variety of models. What a shame they're being so petty about this.
bryanhogan 19d ago
> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts. I'm surprised how clear they are about this. Related: Can highly recommend Zed as an alternative, it's better than VSCode with the Codex extension as managing multiple chats is much nicer in Zed. Zed: https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/
zxspectrum1982 19d ago
I use Cursor at work and love it. It's a great IDE, the best IMHO. But it becomes really expensive. Since the introduction of the Cursor Token Rate, my company tells us to use Claude and Codex directly with Anthropic (or Vertex AI) and OpenAI, respectively. https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate I'm now using Grok 4.6 most of the time. Sonnet some times. But that's it. Cursor-native models 99% of the time. I'm pretty sure Anthropic will follow OpenAI soon in pulling their models out of Cursor because it's now a true competitor.
- DefineOutside 18d ago
  It's insane that Cursor charges 25 extra cents per million tokens on a model that charges 2 cents per million cached tokens. Basically everyone is forced to use Cursor's own models at this point as otherwise the costs are simply too high.
darepublic 19d ago
I'm not impressed with cursor and it's decidedly not worth 1 mil in terms of its engineering. Perhaps it's user base and their loyalty makes up the vast majority of its evaluation. But to me it's ridiculous that a dev would use cursor or think that it's indispensable to them
twobitshifter 18d ago
In a sane world would this be a potential antitrust case as they are a direct competitor to Codex? How can you ban a competitor from using a model that you openly provide access to? I understand that the OpenAI ToS may have been violated by X, but has anyone ruled on distillation as fair use? OpenAI believes distillation of nonAI produced content is fair use, so they don’t appear to have a leg to stand on.
- verdverm 18d ago
  In a sane world, one should be able to choose not to do business with a company for any reason there are plenty of alternatives, 100s, so I don't think antitrust is on the table, think of this more like a boycott of the world's richest man for being a twat
  - richard___ 18d ago
    you are projecting
    - verdverm 18d ago
      you dont know me, so I don't know on what basis you make this claim, boycotting Elon and his companies is a real thing people do for ethical reasons, see Tesla sales as a data point
- paxys 18d ago
  "You are not allowed to use our services to develop a competing product" is a standard clause in pretty much every contract of this nature. There's nothing antitrust about it. Companies are allowed to say no to bad deals.
quicklywilliam 18d ago
I think it’s important not to let AI companies control the framing here. This is anti-competitive behavior, plain and simple. The fact that xAI/Musk routinely break the law simply provides the fig leaf. Distillation is a threat to frontier model companies, but that doesn’t make it dangerous or wrong. OpenAI can (and likely will) use the same logic to ban you from using open source harnesses.
- lovich 18d ago
  I’m on team fuck both of these organizations, but not continuing to work with an organization that already willing violated contracts you had with them doesn’t exactly seem like a hard to justify decision. That is to say, this isn’t a fig leaf imo.
varispeed 18d ago
Why nobody vibe coded Cursor yet? It's a basic extension of VS Code.
stiltzkin 18d ago
[dead]
bobby_coder_55 18d ago
Great. Sam Altman sold us all out to venture capital. So I won’t be using ChatGPT anymore. Also, I noticed that ChatGPT lies more than any other AI of all the ones I’ve tested.
ChristmasTomer 18d ago
[dead]
matthewsjess 17d ago
Call me old-fashioned. I'd rather have copyright law enforcement than terms of service. A girl can dream.
habosa 17d ago
Does anyone have any recommendations for something like Cursor but more open? Cursor's harness is so much faster than anything else I've used that I just can't give it up, using Claude Code feels like being on 0.25x speed. Also I do like the IDE-style UI, being able to highlight code in a file editor and then quickly add that to my chat (Cmd-L) is really nice and much more difficult in CLI based harnesses. Right now I think GPT 5.6 Luna is by far the most cost effective model, so this change is effectively kicking me off of Cursor.
- s4i 17d ago
  This, and the keep/undo flow, forking agent sessions (including renaming them)... The UX could be better at places but the core features of what Cursor has (for someone who came from VS Code) is an unbeatable mix. Really would like to find something else. I did try Kiro which seems to have the same philosophy but it's just not there. Most of the features I like in Cursor are missing. Some other commenters mentioned that VS Code + Copilot would be better these days. Dunno.
  - beckhamc 16d ago
    I am also wondering the same thing as OP. Somewhat tangential thought, but I recently realised that what I would really love in an IDE is a "first class" Markdown editing experience, just because most of my day-to-day is managing and writing docs rather than editing code. Cursor has Markdown rendering support of course but it seems to have two implementations, each sort of clunky in their own way. And I want something more WYSIWYG but with Latex / flowchart / etc. support built-in. OpenKnowledge seems to maybe fill that niche somewhat (it also supports annotating Markdown with comments to feed into an agent), and has agent integration within the GUI, but one killer feature that seems to be missing is Remote SSH support (short of hosting its web server on the remote and having the IDE live in the browser).
daft_pink 17d ago
makes sense. cursor is a real competitor to openai. we're completely switching to grok bot at work after going from claude code >> codex >> grok bot.

852 points by meetpateltech 19d ago

Bummed, but I guess for me, doesn't mean cursor subscription ending though. Grok is a pretty amazing model for the speed and price on Cursor.

hackernud3s 19d ago
Does Grok have a subscription that competes with Claude Max $100 plan (genuinely curious)
- maipen 19d ago
  Yes it does. You can either subscribe to grok directly or cursor. You have many tiers and all of them have generous usage. Grok is a workhorse, not the smartest yet, but produces good code and follows the plan. Grok 5, which has been training since beginnig of this year, will probably be a monster. (10T/6T Param model variants)
- Jcampuzano2 19d ago
  Yes, any Cursor sub includes a separate tier of usage for Cursor/SpaceX first party models separate from usage of third party models. I have a $20 Cursor sub still personally and would say that the usage for Grok models is much higher than what $20 gets you with Anthropic. I can't speak for the $100 plan but I would assume it scales similarly. I rarely run out of my usage monthly even with the $20 plan.
  - mgcross 19d ago
    I'm on the $20 plan too and the only time I run over is if I'm using Opus (or probably other third-party models). Grok and Composer seem nearly free at this point. Cursor also gave me a $100 credit for Grok after 81% of my usage was on TP models. I don't think Grok 4.6 is quite at the level of Opus 5, but it's close and so much faster (and less chatty).
- thefourthchime 18d ago
  It's a little confusing because Grok and Cursor kinda live in different worlds. Grok has SuperGrok and SuperGrok Heavy ($300 a month!) The best bet is Cursor Ultra ($200), which is the equivalent a month plan that you get from OpenAI and Anthropic. I get a LOT more capacity out of it because I almost always use the "Auto" mode, which auto picks between Opus 5, GPT 5.6, Grok 4.6, and Composer 2.5. I like Auto mode so much actually. I use it for my Cursor work account as well because it's about 10x faster than just using Opus 5 or GPT 5.6 and about 90% is good. I switch back to the bigger models if I get in trouble, but that's pretty rare. Vibe coding requires some discipline. You need understand what it's trying to do. If you have a good mental model you can keep it out of trouble. If you don't, it doesn't matter how good the model is. You're gonna end up in a mess.

swader999 19d ago

Can't cursor just use open router? This might backfire on them and push more money to second tier good enough models.

daemon_9009 11d ago

It's just the beef between musk and Altman, nothing to do with the models.

sidcool 19d ago

This is personal, not business.

throwitaway222 19d ago

Makes sense.

demibabs 19d ago

Wow, I don’t use cursor but that seems pretty bad for them. Is there a way to work around this (like using your OpenAI limits directly?)

charrondev 19d ago
I used cursor extensively both at work and for personal use. Its harness is pretty darn good but I basically never used OpenAI models in it. The first party cursor models (initially composer and now grok-cursor) and price very competitively for their quality and have very generous usage limits included in the base plans, and then per token pricing afterwards. Occasionally I’ve used some of the Anthropic models in it but found their cost massively outweighed the benefits for the type of usage we do. I was using Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6 for a while but the newer models are a lot more expensive at the per-token pricing.
auscompgeek 19d ago
Cursor does currently allow users to BYO OpenAI token. Given Cursor won't have access to OpenAI models for prompt engineering/evals though, there's definitely a question of whether they'd allow picking any new OpenAI models, assuming the BYOK option continues to exist at all.
- Maxious 19d ago
  Email to customers now "We’re speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this, and we will share more in the coming weeks around continuity of access to OpenAI models. We’ll continue to offer ways to access all models in Cursor.
ralusek 19d ago
It's basically not going to affect them at all. I don't know a single person that uses OpenAI models via Cursor. Saw another comment say it was 5%.
- hirako2000 19d ago
  All it shows is that openai is likely still subsidizing inference, sees no value in integration buried within other branded tooling competing with theirs.

Jcampuzano2 19d ago

It was honestly just a matter of time, given all of the bad blood there is between Sam and Elon and Elon basically admitting under oath they were distilling other companies models. I wonder if Anthropic will follow suit given their campaign against distillation or if they'll stay quiet given their reliance on SpaceX (among others) for hardware.

Y0s 19d ago

So Astra release Friday 13th November!?

Jcampuzano2 19d ago
The way I read the article was that they will continue providing their current models, but won't let them use any newer ones announced even between now and the end date. But I might be wrong. > we’ve decided to hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor.

bentt 19d ago

While this isn't great for users it seems like a pretty standard circling of the wagons in preparation for the next phase in the battle for frontier AI dominance. Ironically, as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic. I don't feel good about giving OpenAI money directly, but I've found switching to GPT 5.6 Sol now and again in Cursor to be useful. Now I'll probably just forget about OpenAI models.

deleted 19d ago
[deleted]
reilly3000 19d ago
I think they are betting that Astra will be impossible to ignore.
- SoftTalker 19d ago
  For three months, until the next SOTA model drops. And with each improved model, the number of people who actually need it declines.
  - ronsor 19d ago
    Exactly. Astra will likely get its Mythos moment, and then another Chinese lab releases its equivalent three months later while Anthropic releases a newer, better model.
    - dakolli 19d ago
      There's a reason why most businesses don't hire PhDs, they dont need it. PhDs are cheap in many countries, arguably more affordable than a full time mythos lvl agent, yet businesses in India still don't hire 30k a year PhDs to run their businesses. Its simply not necessary. AI labs have lost the plot from a business perspective. If chasing ASI is the goal, that also seems stupid.. Putting all of your customers out of business with ASI doesn't really lead to great outcomes either. They're commodity fetishism maxxing.

redox99 19d ago

It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans. Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.

dancemethis 19d ago
I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with. Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
- dakolli 19d ago
  Couldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality? I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
  - raincole 19d ago
    You can just pirate Adobe's software and their marketcap is 115.88B.
  - natdempk 19d ago
    Cursor charges the “Cursor Token Rate” for BYOK https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate
    - sourcecodeplz 19d ago
      No. Its is not for bring your own key. It is for 3rd party models (which you get double the amount of your sub price as usage). Of course they wont charge you extra for BYOK. how would they???

satvikpendem 19d ago

If you have such a world changing technology, why sell an API when you can capture all the value yourself? That's what every provider is asking themselves. Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.

CoolestBeans 19d ago
Being a pure play model provider is completely untenable right now. Coding agents own your demand; Nvidia, data centers, and DRAM manufacturers own your supply. You're getting squeezed by open weight models. Your only bet to making money off this thing is by locking your model down to your program to have some semblance of a moat. The fact that businesses can change providers with just the change of an API key is unsustainable. You have neither the "hard to switch" lock-in of a traditional software company nor do you have the near-zero marginal cost of production they have. Each token of inference costs you money, not to mention the training costs. At least locking the models down to your harness lets you get some sort of lock-in.
- iamflimflam1 19d ago
  Lots of enterprises don’t want to use OpenAI or Anthropic directly. They will go via AWS bedrock or google’s equivalent. The model providers are in a difficult position. With an added danger of open weight models that are within reach of large enterprises running themselves.

closetheloopdev 19d ago

> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms. This move seems to protect Astra against distillation. I wonder whether Astra will be released before or after 11/12.

mattnewton 19d ago
Before, but they say that they’re also not going to provide astra to cursor subscribers

ananmays 19d ago

> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms. I think Sam Altman has played a clever business move here, they can use this excuse immediately after the Hugging Face leaks and it's not going to be dismissed willy-nilly. Whereas long term they probably wanted to end their partnership with Cursor anyway. I bet Dario will be happy about this too, but maybe the compute deal prevents him from doing similar anytime soon. Very interesting times we live in...

semiquaver 19d ago
Is it really an excuse? As the release points out, musk admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI’s models to produce xai models on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think about goose for the gander wrt IP theft, I wouldn’t voluntarily do business with a competitor who was actively and brazenly flouting my terms, would you?
- userbinator 19d ago
  It's amusingly ironic to talk about "IP theft" in the context of AI models.
  - semiquaver 19d ago
    Shorthand. I agree it’s hypocritical and theft isn’t the right word, but we make do with the words we have.
- aeternum 19d ago
  OpenAI's models are distilled from your HN posts
  - semiquaver 18d ago
    Quite sure I covered that aspect, thanks.

__initbrian__ 19d ago

they’ll see an uptick in codex user count trying the new models and can build a narrative around that too

AnonHP 19d ago

My guess is that OpenAI now has a full blown Cursor equivalent in development (an expansion of Codex?) and will announce it in September. Otherwise it stands to lose those who are used to working with Cursor.

wheelhead 19d ago
Yeah, the "go above and beyond for our users" implies they have a "better" version of Cursor coming. Probably integrating their new chip/microphone based product.
Maxious 19d ago
OpenAI acquired Ona in June https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/ https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/
tomr75 19d ago
codex is already great.. cursor is just a competing harness codex growth at 20mill now, prob more cost effective to allocate that compute to people directly paying now

noodletheworld 19d ago

Days until cursor announces open models… 3, 2, 1… Seriously though, when the api providers start blacklisting cursor and they’re forced to swap to open weight models… If that happens, what even is the difference between openrouter and cursor?

alphabettsy 19d ago
They already have open models. https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing
skeledrew 19d ago
Well, one has a pretty popular harness.
- yomu123 19d ago
  sure?
alberth 19d ago
You assume OpenAI doesn’t turn off access to OpenRouter too. Strategically, OpenAI long-term will want to own the direct relationship with all their customers. As will most major AI labs.

dgrin91 19d ago

Not surprised, but honestly I don't feel like this is a huge loss for cursor. Models are so commoditized, and 99% of users don't need particularly fancy models. Between existing anthropic models, composer-2, honestly even grok models, and also the fact that many people just use 'auto' mode, I feel like many won't feel the impact for OpenAI's withdrawal. Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For better or worse though, Xai seems like its lining themselves up to handle being on their own for cursor.

thefourthchime 18d ago
Agree, I use Auto 90% of the time. I doubt I'll tell the difference.

skeledrew 19d ago

> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts. > After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke (opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others). I have never seen one large company throw another large company under the bus without any legalese filters like this before. Wondering if OpenAI site got pwned. Or maybe we in some strange, alternative reality. I doubt even their LLMs would be this frank.

the_real_cher 19d ago
Sam and Elon have a long standing feud. This is more than just bad blood between companies.
- skeledrew 19d ago
  Still, where's the legalese? I'd expect something like this on an individual's blog, not a company's.
  - mikeyouse 19d ago
    They can skip the legalese because Musk had testified under oath that Grok was distilling OpenAI models while Elon was on the board of OpenAI. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/921546/elon-musk-xai-openai-trial-model-distillation https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/921546/e...
    - 293725903 18d ago
      [dead]
AirMax98 19d ago
And to announce it on a Friday night. Brutal.
Palmik 19d ago

gexla 19d ago

I don't see how it makes sense to use models outside of Grok or Composer in cursor unless you like the tooling to such degree that you're willing to pay out the nose for access to OpenAI and Anthropic to use with that tooling. And Codex is regularly scoring towards the top among harnesses, so you might as well use the best harness available for the given model. I'm happy with Grok and Composer in Cursor. If Cursor wants to add more models, they should host more open models.

herrvogel- 19d ago
Is there a good place for harness comparison/scoring?
- reilly3000 19d ago
  https://www.harness-bench.ai/leaderboard.html https://www.harness-bench.ai/leaderboard.html This provides a method, but the data looks stale and perhaps a bit thin compared to say, Cursor, or even AntiGravity data.
  - alainchabat 19d ago
    never heard of nanobot. how reliable is this benchmark?
    - reilly3000 19d ago
      I can’t speak to the veracity of the benchmarks but it appears their methodology is sound. Nanobot has 47k stars, fwiw https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot It has been more of an OpenClaw or Hermes alternative than a coding agent like OpenCode or Pi, so it’s likely to do well given less context bloat.
    - cheeze 19d ago
      IMO it's not. It's benchmarking GPT 5.4 and Opus 4.6. It's also missing Claude Code... one of the most popular harnesses (the most?)

Philpax 19d ago

Honestly, can't say I miss my Cursor subscription at all, and I'm surprised they're still a going concern. Why would I want to use a proprietary VSCode fork with an identity crisis when I can use literally any editor with any agent and have about the same experience?

disgruntledphd2 19d ago
The integrated review UI is super helpful, but apparently nobody reviews code anymore except me.
- dexterlagan 19d ago
  I use Claude Code (both Desktop and CLI) all day every day (as well as OpenCode with DeepSeek V4 among others). For non-mission-critical stuff (small internal tools, anything that doesn't touch the client and doesn't handle critical data or infra), I'm on Auto (sandboxed in the working directory). For everything else I approve every change, meaning I review every code change the model proposes. Plan mode is great to write the architecture as well, as it doesn't touch any file, doesn't write anything, and lets me iterate until the arch is perfect and the proposed high-level code (modules etc) is solid. I haven't used an editor in over 4 years, apart from writing specs.
  - disgruntledphd2 18d ago
    How do you review the code? I can use git to see changes, but it's super annoying to tell the agent file line plus comment for each change, so I catch less stuff early which seems to compound.
    - beckhamc 17d ago
      This may be of use to you, I wrote a similar reply earlier in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49486172#49491426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49486172#49491426
  - danielhorilla 18d ago

bix6 19d ago

Why would they give the maximum time instead of the minimum given violation has already occurred?

riffraff 19d ago
Because it doesn't matter anymore for current models and they want to show goodwill, probably.

thoughtpeddler 19d ago

Spend a lot of time thinking about why individuals shouldn't trust large AI cos, now it's interesting getting to think about how the AI companies themselves don't trust each other. Capitalism is viciously cold and uncaring.

gnarlouse 19d ago
At least capitalism isn't at the center of the most impactful technological revolution in human history.
- blackqueeriroh 19d ago
  Yeah, that’s mostly been driven by socialism
- thoughtpeddler 19d ago
  Not sure the larger point you're trying to make (maybe we're on the same page?), but it's a fact that AI has come from heavy long-term investments by the academic and public sectors, yet private companies are accruing most of the gains
  - atmosx 19d ago
    The iPhone too, etc. These ppl, who think Capitalism as a religion in a couple of years will be singing another tune with the same reassurances. The movie Goya’s Ghost explains this in great detail.
fhn 19d ago
show me a communist country
- timmmmmmay 19d ago
  back when the USSR was still a going concern, there were zero American leftists claiming that it wasn't really communist. that only started happening after they failed

pinkmuffinere 19d ago

> We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them. Do I smell a cursor-analogue from openAI?

rgbrenner 19d ago

Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models. This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider. It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.

frankacter 19d ago
Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use. That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling. >"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
- rgbrenner 19d ago
  Cursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access-to-claude/ https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access... And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropic-cuts-windsurfs-claude-access-before-openai-acquisition/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi... So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
  - frankacter 18d ago
    Again neither of those links indicated usage that violate TOS beyond being a major competitor. They indiacte their development staff are using it, and they access it via API, then then go on to say all the nefarious things they "could" be doing, stopping before stating they actually are. Specifically the TOS violation was: >customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service" So if you are building a competitive product, that alone is a TOS violation from their perspective. Which is fine and their prerogative, but we shouldn't cast a dark cloud suggesting other violations were happening without stated evidence. OpenAI publicly stated they can't "trust that xAI will use it within terms" not even that they've violated, not that there has been a violation from the Cursor team. https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in-decision-to-drop-cursor-partnership/ https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in... >OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service"

iJohnDoe 19d ago

I guess I’m on the right track. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835 If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.

dumbmrblah 19d ago
Grok? Google? I'm not a fan of Elon, nor do I use Cursor, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't the only models.
ralusek 19d ago
Cursor is like one of the least economical ways to use Claude and OpenAI, virtually nobody does it. You use Cursor for their autocomplete/composer + grok. For using Claude and Codex, you get immeasurably more bang for your buck just using them directly.
- Synthetic7346 19d ago
  Not in enterprise
brightball 19d ago
I've been using Cursor with Grok 4.6 a lot over the last week or so. Grok Build as well. Both options are performing very well for me.
- therealdrag0 19d ago
  Ya I was slow to try Grok but I’m now happy with it.
iJohnDoe 19d ago
All good points. However, it's not a safe assumption that everyone operates that way. People probably use the flagship models because that's what they know. Sure, some probably just use the default, in this case Grok. Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok. Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.

killerdog10 19d ago

[dead]

simontlbt 19d ago

OpenAI / Sam Altman is probably even shadier than musk

s1n_ 19d ago
“Satan is probably even shadier than Beelzebub”
DarmokTanagra 19d ago
No love for Sama, but Musk is bond villain levels of shady. The man is an outright existential threat to democracy.

ergocoder 19d ago

Cursor founder just tweeted that he was sad to see this ban and that OpenAI model represented around 5% of total usage. Burn.

corentin88 19d ago
Source?
- ergocoder 18d ago
  A Cursor CEO's tweet.
fsh 19d ago
That's probably a lot more than their market share versus Claude Code and Codex.
cactusplant7374 19d ago
Codex has 20+ million users. They are doing much better than Cursor.
ralph84 19d ago
5% of traffic. OpenAI models are a much higher percentage of revenue.
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
dbbk 19d ago
Not really a surprise given their own models are the default option? Most people wouldn't change model. And if you want to use Claude or GPT you don't really have a reason to use Cursor over Claude Code or Codex
ncr100 19d ago
Is this spite?

charcircuit 19d ago

What happened to researchers embracing the open research culture of improving on the results of others?

ChannelFence 19d ago

this is a pretty clean test of whether people were buying cursor or just using it for convenient access to whichever model was flavor of the week. i work in qa so i'm naturally wary of adding another critical dependency to a development workflow, if the model you actually want can just disappear because two vendor change ownership or start argueing then the wrapper has to be really good on its own. cursors harness and its own models may be good enough that users stay, and if they do cursor has a moat at least. if everyone follows the openai models out the door, it will just become a polished ui.

pianopatrick 19d ago
I use Cursor because I listened to YouTube interviews with the teams behind most of these products and I trusted their team the most.
- iamleppert 19d ago
  How TF do you trust people you don’t know from YouTube interviews? You don’t know them. They are strangers to you trying to sell you something.
  - pianopatrick 18d ago
    Yeah, well that's the same as all the other AI companies isn't it

est 19d ago

Models are now having much tighter integration with harness. It's gunna to happen anyway. We are sailing into the age of vertically integrated intelligence.

benatkin 19d ago

It's going to be tough for Origin, their code hosting platform, to follow in the footsteps of GitHub, if they can't be treated as a neutral party.

chr15m 19d ago

Allowing the company or harness to dictate which models you use is crazy.

nunez 19d ago

Damn; Cursor has basically no value if Anthropic pulls the same move. Twitter Part 2 indeed.

arcanemachiner 19d ago
Anthropic rents a lot of capacity from xAI, so I don't think they're in a position to do the same.
- shye 19d ago
  Anthropic already stopped selling use of their models to xAI when they suspect foul play there.
throw03172019 19d ago
I’d be canceling for sure Grok is a huge joke and consistently destroys my Clojure files.
hirako2000 19d ago
How so? A dozen very capable models out there. And the gap between frontier models from the two main US labs kept narrowing, at this point non existent. The quality/price ratio is clearly superior when running Qwen, GLM, or Deepseek. To make a product more exclusive won't hide the fact that product is becoming more and more irrelevant.
- andy_ppp 19d ago
  Most people do not enjoy the output of the open models or know where their code is being sent so I’m out. Also I don’t trust Elon anyway, I’m just going to make a VS Code Extension that handles things how I want but I’d like to offer the same deals Cursor got for tokens with OpenAI and Anthropic, for me this was the key 1/4 token cost!

moomoo11 19d ago

i don't see the point of cursor when vsc + codex extension does the same thing. i don't use autocomplete anymore (who writes code anymore? lol) any and anyone using grok unironically is also probably a moron. i only tell VC type people or others from whom i want something "oh yeah grok is cool" if they mention it, because they're always sucking off Elon

akmarinov 19d ago

This low key confirms Astra for November

GMoromisato 19d ago

Everyone is playing hardball. No one wants to be IBM in an IBM-Microsoft dance. But this is kind of like banning GPU exports to China. It will encourage them to develop their own technology. Yes, it will take them longer, but in the long-run China will be more successful with their own GPU tech. The same could be true of SpaceX/xAI

clarkqaq 13d ago
So now you know why Trump is called "川建国 (Chuan Jianguo)" in China — literally "Trump who builds China" — because he really is building China and making it better (just kidding).
johnnyApplePRNG 19d ago
LOL You had me until: >The same could be true of a company run by a drug addict. Elon Musk is nowhere near as capable as millions of intelligent developers in China.
- inigyou 19d ago
  He doesn't have to be. He just has to hire millions of intelligent developers in China.
  - johnnyApplePRNG 19d ago
    Except legally and structurally, he can't: ITAR: SpaceX is strictly barred by US federal law from hiring non-US persons for aerospace engineering. National Security Scrutiny: xAI operates under increasing US export and tech-transfer controls regarding China. Scale: A private company's recruiting budget cannot compete with the sovereign industrial capacity and state-backed talent pipeline of an entire nation.
angusturner 19d ago
What unique differentiator could musk possibly offer though? Is there really a high demand for racist chatbots with no safety controls? And even if there is, will governments even allow it to keep operating?

rolymath 19d ago

Feels like scam altam writes the openai blog posts himself. The way Musk is brought up feels very 'mean girl'y

rippeltippel 19d ago

I may be a rare Cursor user around here, but I am saddened by this news. The thing that keeps me using it is precisely the ability to switch between models: I usually do brainstorm/planning with Sol or Terra, then let Composer (free) deal with the implementation. For certain tasks I use Claude, which tends to be more expensive but sometimes saves me time. Using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Cursor is cheaper than having two separate subscriptions, and their free tier of Composer is good enough. I will now have to reconsider my options.

idrissbellil 19d ago
It's very easy to achieve that and more with: Crush (or Opencode) + OpenRouter right from the terminal. Takes a minute to setup.
- mmastrac 19d ago
  If you can explain how to make compaction not suck in opencode or Kilo Code, I would love to know how. I am really trying to make use of other harnesses but that's a major sticking point.
  - 9dev 19d ago
    Never compact. Not automatically, not manually. Instead, let it write ledgers and checklists or handover prompt if necessary, and start fresh sessions as often as possible.
    - dannyw 19d ago
      What do you do for long-running goals / tasks where you are not interactively prompting?
      - 9dev 19d ago
        Create a design spec and implementation plan first. If necessary, split that in phases. Then create a ledger that always holds the current status, and instruct the model to update that after it completes a task in the plan, and to append any issues it encounters during the implementation. Then you can let it run, and when it stops, point a fresh session to the ledger to pick up the work from where the previous one left off. You can get more fancy by using something like GitHub issues for coordination too and have multiple sessions create issues and epics and others to work on that in isolated worktrees, but the spec-plan-ledger approach usually works great for small to medium large projects.

saos 19d ago

They were going to do this regardless of SpaceX.

tonyhart7 19d ago

pot calling kettle black

fy20 19d ago

At my dayjob we are big users of Cursor's Cloud Agents. We use them to trigger automated investigations customer support issues, alarms, feature requests etc. The Cursor editor is fairly meh in comparison, but this has become a big part of our workflow. And having anyone on our team manage them. What competing products are there we should try?

dregitsky 19d ago
Devin Automations is the most obvious one: solid UX, but can get very expensive to run. There are also a bunch of newer startups in this space. I'm building one myself, https://boxes.dev https://boxes.dev -- we're very early but building for this exact use case. Some other ones worth a look are Factory Droid and Amp Orbs. Those two build their own agent harness (like Cursor), whereas with boxes.dev we run the native codex and claude code harnesses directly.

deleted 19d ago

[deleted]

kaiji1126 19d ago

[flagged]

neya 19d ago

We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts. The pot calling the kettle black. Look who's talking. A company that trained it's models illegally on so many copyrighted materials without compensating anyone involved. For a company named "Open" AI, they've been hardly open at all and the slew of resignations of top tier execs in the company is really the proof. Make no mistake, this isn't a moral decision. This is just killing the competition using morality as an excuse.

armcat 19d ago
Codex cli is open source rust project (Claude Code is not). Whisper is an open weight ASR/STT model. GPT-OSS is an open weight LLM that can run locally and is still very capable. CLIP is an open source model used for image encoding. Just some of the open contributions from OpenAI
- neya 19d ago
  All these were released way late for a company called "Open" AI. But go on, keep defending the billion dollar corporation.
inigyou 19d ago
Correct. It's killing the competition. Which is what you should do if you want to run a successful business.
- neya 19d ago
  Then don't be pretentious and frame it as a morality statement. Just call it what it is.
  - inigyou 19d ago
    Framing your competition killing as morality is also something you should do to be successful.

Palmik 19d ago

Elon Musk openly admitted to distilling OpenAI's models [1], which I think explains the "based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts". Last year, Anthropic cut off Windsurf the same way [2]. Fortunately, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI allows you to use your subscription with other harnesses, including Cursor. Of course today, Anthropic is taking the "high road" and is OK with with SpaceX [3] including their models in Cursor, because they need SpaceX's compute. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elon-musk-admits-xai-distilled-openai-data-to-train-models-heres-what-that-means/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is-limiting-its-direct-access-to-claude-ai-models/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is... [3] https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657 https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657

elil17 19d ago
More generally, Musk admittedly works with a "move fast and break things" mentality. His companies have repeatedly broken environmental laws, labor laws, and securities laws. His companies often fail to deliver the features they promise and routinely miss deadlines they've committed to. They routinely violate contracts that they have agreed to. Not doing business with them is a completely normal and unremarkable decision.

wodenokoto 19d ago

> we are giving the maximum notice provided by our contract. Anyone else surprised that the maximum notice period allowed is about 3 months? I would have thought 3 months is minimum notice period, with provisions to stop faster if any provable violation occurs.

elil17 19d ago
It makes no sense that a contract would even provide a maximum notice period. Why would parties put that in? What benefit would either derive from restricting themselves to not getting earlier notice.
- aroman 19d ago
  I read it as: we acted as quickly as we could once it became possible to do so, i.e., the change in control was completed. not that their special agreement carved out some maximum notice term.
Kubuxu 19d ago
From the article, it seems they using a clause allowing them to terminate the contract after transfer of ownership. This clause probably has a expiry date and they are saying “we are trying not to be jerks here by waiting until the last second to trigger it”.
hn1986 18d ago
3 months is a long time in AI world

armcat 19d ago

Does this also apply to API endpoints, let’s say if you want to provide API keys in Cursor to Azure or Bedrock deployment of a GPT model?

post-it 19d ago
I can't imagine it would.

yomu123 19d ago

helloooo

woggy 19d ago

Why maximum notice? Why not minimum notice? Elon doesn't deserve more than that.

iamflimflam1 19d ago
They need time to build a cursor equivalent.
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
gverrilla 19d ago
I agree Elon deserved that, but there are users involved too.

mcintyre1994 19d ago

This seems like a no brainer, not sure how Cursor would expect to be trusted by any other company now that they’re owned by SpaceX.

whamlastxmas 19d ago
I trust them more than someone who took a nonprofit designed to be open and had tens of millions in donations to do just that, and then turned into a for profit who's cuddled up tight with Microsoft and is so closed they're preemptively ending contracts with someone under pretty flimsy accusations. And doubly funny it's the person who's responsible for them even existing. And from whom they stole tens of millions
thefourthchime 18d ago
I really get sick of this anti-Elon rhetoric around here. Can we not keep it to technical merits and not get sucked up into politics? The guy's clearly nuts, but he's also done an incredible amount of amazing things.
- Anamon 16d ago
  This isn't a technical article, though. It's about contracts, so one party's self-admitted habit of ignoring contractual obligations seems very relevant and not a random ad hominem.

armcat 19d ago

You can still use it via API keys (answering my own question from earlier), https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343774?s=46 https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343774?s=46

gempir 19d ago
The last time I tried an API Key in Cursor they limited it to the very basic Ask mode. No Agent Mode. So this is very much useless if still the case

dozerly 19d ago

Any tool that tightly couples you to an inference provider is a sub-par tool and destined to be forgotten.

tanepiper 19d ago

What a shame for Cursor. I found it a great tool - I actually liked Composer 2.5; but now being bought by SpaceX has for a while left a bad taste - and they keep pushing Grok and now GrokBot. I took the 50% discount instead of cancelling - but with this I'll likely not renew. So sad to watch them go from great to mediocre in such a short time.

tkel 19d ago
Perhaps now they'll release a 3.0 MechaHitler version
ctrlkctrls 18d ago
Didn't Kamprad have some pretty strong ties to the Nazi party? Yet you have a bad taste in your mouth because Cursor gets bought by SpaceX! Virtue signaling in glass houses...
- tanepiper 18d ago
  Sorry why are you mentioning Nazis? I didn't - I think the lady sockpuppet doth protest too much...

chrisrickard 19d ago

damn... cursor doesn't get as much love as claude code or codex (on here anyways), but honestly, it's gotten amazing in the last 6 months. i loved switching between sol / fable / grok 4.5. ... and something tells me fable might not be available on cursor for much longer :/

simondotau 18d ago
Try kimi k3, for code review at least. I think it’s significantly better than Sol and Anthropic for analysis, if you care about your code.

jackjeff 19d ago

Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms - fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg - in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small - in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by hand. It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor. Also I find that incredibly slow. By the time Claude finished a prompt I could have done a few in cursor. And mind you, I’ve been wanting to use zed instead but the clunky vscode fork called cursor. But cursor has just a better UX for AI integration even though it’s slow and guzzle up RAM.

BrokenCogs 19d ago
Vs code copilot is the same or better than cursor in my opinion - I mean that's where cursor comes from
- Sammi 18d ago
  I just switched back to VS Code from Cursor a week ago. Things seem great and VS Code has caught up. Last time I tried switching back was in November and VS Code was not ready then.
- minhaz23 18d ago
  Is this the chat on the side or the agents feature?
  - BrokenCogs 18d ago
    The chat on the side can use agents too
dools 19d ago
Check out JetBrains Air

dools 19d ago

When I was bringing up IDEs at work and advocating JetBrains (I’ve since built my own … ) a colleague questioned why we don’t just use cursor instead of waiting for JetBrains Air to come out. The products are basically equivalent but JetBrains is a profitable bootstrapped company that has been building IDEs for 20 years and Cursor is a flash in the pan startup with a squillion dollar valuation to support. Sooner or later they’re going to do something that will fuck their users over. And selling to SpaceX was it!

vachina 19d ago

Auto and Grok is pretty good. As a casual user OpenAI models are expensive for the marginal (or none if at all) step up in performance.

zyralab 19d ago

Kinda crazy how fast things can change after an acquisition If your coding tool depends on other companies’ AI models, one business decision can suddenly change the whole product

Jeeetendra 19d ago

This is the platform risk of building on rented intelligence. Cursor’s moat now has to be its harness and true model portability—not privileged access to any one AI lab.

qaq 19d ago

I mean, given Sam and Elon’s relationship, I don’t think anyone is surprised.

jimnotgym 19d ago

Can I suppose that Cursor, by seeing everyones prompts and all of the responses from the models, are in a position to sort of MITM distill them?

pnt12 19d ago
Yes, and given it's now owned by Elon Musk, who is not trustworthy, it's possible he would try to do it. Although I wouldn't take an Openai announcement literally, as Sam Altman is also not trustworthy.
maipen 19d ago
Unless you run your models and harness completely locally, you can't verify your data isn't being used. All of these companies, and I truly mean all, stole data to train their models.
paxys 18d ago
Musk was forced to admit under oath during his OpenAI lawsuit that xAI distilled GPT models to train Grok. No reason to believe he won't use Cursor data for the same thing, if it isn't happening already.

zoobab 19d ago

So much for 'open'.

throwaw12 19d ago

Something deep inside me is saying this is good for us, because Cursor will try harder to train better coding models to stay afloat.

sajithdilshan 19d ago

I think there is still a huge market for models that are specialised in software development (system design, infrastructure, coding, etc.). If a company can provide the access to such a model via AWS Bedrock or similar enterprise compliant platform with a decent IDE/harness they can capture billions of dollars of market. The closest we have to this is Claude Code but I think it can even be better and specialised. Cursor has an enormous amount of data on coding and developer usage and maybe they should use that to build a proper platform

formvoltron 19d ago

Good! I don't consider myself a Nazi and so I'm happy a big, influential tech company refuses to business with a man who does the Nazi salute on television.

WesolyKubeczek 19d ago

[flagged]

shevy-java 19d ago

The billionaires buy up key technology now. I don't like this.

robeym 19d ago

I think the entire purpose of the acquisition was just to buy a chunk of the market for their own models. Curious to see if Musk responds.

docmars 19d ago

I guess they don't like money, because Cursor is really good and offers a variety of models. What a shame they're being so petty about this.

bryanhogan 19d ago

> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts. I'm surprised how clear they are about this. Related: Can highly recommend Zed as an alternative, it's better than VSCode with the Codex extension as managing multiple chats is much nicer in Zed. Zed: https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/

zxspectrum1982 19d ago

I use Cursor at work and love it. It's a great IDE, the best IMHO. But it becomes really expensive. Since the introduction of the Cursor Token Rate, my company tells us to use Claude and Codex directly with Anthropic (or Vertex AI) and OpenAI, respectively. https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate I'm now using Grok 4.6 most of the time. Sonnet some times. But that's it. Cursor-native models 99% of the time. I'm pretty sure Anthropic will follow OpenAI soon in pulling their models out of Cursor because it's now a true competitor.

DefineOutside 18d ago
It's insane that Cursor charges 25 extra cents per million tokens on a model that charges 2 cents per million cached tokens. Basically everyone is forced to use Cursor's own models at this point as otherwise the costs are simply too high.

darepublic 19d ago

I'm not impressed with cursor and it's decidedly not worth 1 mil in terms of its engineering. Perhaps it's user base and their loyalty makes up the vast majority of its evaluation. But to me it's ridiculous that a dev would use cursor or think that it's indispensable to them

twobitshifter 18d ago

In a sane world would this be a potential antitrust case as they are a direct competitor to Codex? How can you ban a competitor from using a model that you openly provide access to? I understand that the OpenAI ToS may have been violated by X, but has anyone ruled on distillation as fair use? OpenAI believes distillation of nonAI produced content is fair use, so they don’t appear to have a leg to stand on.

verdverm 18d ago
In a sane world, one should be able to choose not to do business with a company for any reason there are plenty of alternatives, 100s, so I don't think antitrust is on the table, think of this more like a boycott of the world's richest man for being a twat
- richard___ 18d ago
  you are projecting
  - verdverm 18d ago
    you dont know me, so I don't know on what basis you make this claim, boycotting Elon and his companies is a real thing people do for ethical reasons, see Tesla sales as a data point
paxys 18d ago
"You are not allowed to use our services to develop a competing product" is a standard clause in pretty much every contract of this nature. There's nothing antitrust about it. Companies are allowed to say no to bad deals.

quicklywilliam 18d ago

I think it’s important not to let AI companies control the framing here. This is anti-competitive behavior, plain and simple. The fact that xAI/Musk routinely break the law simply provides the fig leaf. Distillation is a threat to frontier model companies, but that doesn’t make it dangerous or wrong. OpenAI can (and likely will) use the same logic to ban you from using open source harnesses.

lovich 18d ago
I’m on team fuck both of these organizations, but not continuing to work with an organization that already willing violated contracts you had with them doesn’t exactly seem like a hard to justify decision. That is to say, this isn’t a fig leaf imo.

varispeed 18d ago

Why nobody vibe coded Cursor yet? It's a basic extension of VS Code.

stiltzkin 18d ago

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bobby_coder_55 18d ago

Great. Sam Altman sold us all out to venture capital. So I won’t be using ChatGPT anymore. Also, I noticed that ChatGPT lies more than any other AI of all the ones I’ve tested.

ChristmasTomer 18d ago

[dead]

matthewsjess 17d ago

Call me old-fashioned. I'd rather have copyright law enforcement than terms of service. A girl can dream.

habosa 17d ago

Does anyone have any recommendations for something like Cursor but more open? Cursor's harness is so much faster than anything else I've used that I just can't give it up, using Claude Code feels like being on 0.25x speed. Also I do like the IDE-style UI, being able to highlight code in a file editor and then quickly add that to my chat (Cmd-L) is really nice and much more difficult in CLI based harnesses. Right now I think GPT 5.6 Luna is by far the most cost effective model, so this change is effectively kicking me off of Cursor.

s4i 17d ago
This, and the keep/undo flow, forking agent sessions (including renaming them)... The UX could be better at places but the core features of what Cursor has (for someone who came from VS Code) is an unbeatable mix. Really would like to find something else. I did try Kiro which seems to have the same philosophy but it's just not there. Most of the features I like in Cursor are missing. Some other commenters mentioned that VS Code + Copilot would be better these days. Dunno.
- beckhamc 16d ago
  I am also wondering the same thing as OP. Somewhat tangential thought, but I recently realised that what I would really love in an IDE is a "first class" Markdown editing experience, just because most of my day-to-day is managing and writing docs rather than editing code. Cursor has Markdown rendering support of course but it seems to have two implementations, each sort of clunky in their own way. And I want something more WYSIWYG but with Latex / flowchart / etc. support built-in. OpenKnowledge seems to maybe fill that niche somewhat (it also supports annotating Markdown with comments to feed into an agent), and has agent integration within the GUI, but one killer feature that seems to be missing is Remote SSH support (short of hosting its web server on the remote and having the IDE live in the browser).

daft_pink 17d ago

makes sense. cursor is a real competitor to openai. we're completely switching to grok bot at work after going from claude code >> codex >> grok bot.