OpenAI is ending its Cursor contract after SpaceX bought the coding tool
OpenAI said Friday it notified SpaceX it intends to wind down providing models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. SpaceX had just bought Cursor’s parent, Anysphere, in a deal Teslarati puts at $60 billion.
That is in OpenAI’s blog. November 12 is the maximum notice the contract provides.
Cursor is a coding tool. A developer writes in it. The app sends that work to someone else’s AI model and pastes the answer back into the editor. OpenAI was one of those vendors. Cursor did not own those models. It rented them.
Teslarati has SpaceX first striking an option in April, $60 billion to acquire or $10 billion for joint development. It exercised the option in June after the SpaceX IPO. The deal closed mid-August.
When a customer gets sold, some vendor contracts let the vendor walk. OpenAI’s custom agreement with Cursor gave it a limited window to cancel after a change of control. SpaceX buying Cursor is that change. OpenAI is using the window. It is holding cancellation to November 12 “while not providing future models to Cursor,” including the upcoming model Astra.
“This decision was incredibly tough, as we care deeply about our models being broadly available for developers. 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.”
OpenAI says it uses custom contracts with large partners to keep terms of service and “safety at scale.” After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, “the company broke the terms of our contract (alongside many others).” “Under oath earlier this year, Musk admitted that xAI, now also part of SpaceX, had violated OpenAI’s terms of service (terms which are similar to xAI’s own).”
OpenAI says it has worked with Cursor nearly four years. Developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor are “the people most affected.”
The Business Times, citing Reuters, says Cursor still offers Grok as first-party, plus Anthropic and Google. Michael Truell, Cursor co-founder now a SpaceX executive, said they were speaking with OpenAI to resolve it. Truell on X: “Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI, we’ve worked closely with their team for years, and we’ve trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business.”
Truell also said OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic. That 5% is his figure. Musk said he “couldn’t care less.”
Tom Brown of Anthropic said on X that Cursor has been a trusted partner since Sonnet 3.5, and that Anthropic will “continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor.”
I would keep the next model off a customer I no longer chose.
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