Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
openai.comIt'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.
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.
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.
What about openrouter though?
Alternate take: open source models and model routers are the real bang for your buck. Subsidized plan or not.
I just told my boss to cancel my cursor subscription. My flow is basically Claude/opencode + kyde/vscode for por changes review
Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile
Agreed. Wrapping token spend is great for pumping your revenue numbers (congrats to them on $60B!), but doesn’t seem sustainable over the long term.
Big reason we built https://boxes.dev around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.
Surely the days of being able to “bring your own subscription” to a third party platform are also numbered?
On one hand, yes, it doesn't make sense to give out subsidized tokens forever.
On the other hand, subscriptions create lock-in in a way that API pricing doesn't.
I think a more likely end is that subscription value decreases over time because API pricing gets more reasonable, but subscriptions stay because they are a good way of getting money out of people consistently.
Right, subscriptions are not only cheaper because they "create lock-in". They also let you do things like forecast demand and plan your capacity for it, borrow against it sometimes if you need to, and keep somewhat less around because your cashflows are predictable. It is also valuable because it keeps customers around but that's by no means the only reason recurring revenue gets a higher multiple.
This is why "subsidized tokens" is possibly a misnomer. Money at lower variance is worth more than the same money at higher variance. Not "subsidy" so much as reducing risk and passing some of that to a consumer.
I’m not so sure… Claude backtracked on this when they tried it
They played pigeon on discless videogame consoles a time or two, too.
How long have you been in tech, outta curiosity?
Edit: great answer.
Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: 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.
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."
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...
And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi...
So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
Anthropic seems to have no issues: https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20
> if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything
It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.
running on someone else's server, you're basically giving them your weights.
i'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer
>Musk admitted to distilling their models.
what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
Well, they will stop releasing their latest models, and just attempt to eat all software themselves.
It will be competitors distilling, or the government getting upset.
It's hard for me to see a different future.
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.
I think they are betting that Astra will be impossible to ignore.
I'd need to have a problem I couldn't solve with current models for my eyes to wander.
What if it’s cheaper too?
Yeah I haven’t had a problem yet which was too difficult for Fable to solve. I do have problems which Sol does not do well on. But if I could get Fable-level intelligence faster/cheaper and less restricted, that’s all I need.
For three months, until the next SOTA model drops. And with each improved model, the number of people who actually need it declines.
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.
Why would you possibly allow companies to push you? You are the customer and you should control which models you use.
Because one is better or worse? What else do you think they meant?
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.
The reason it makes sense is because different models are better at different things. Allowing yourself to be locked in to a particular model by these companies is a bad idea and will lead to worse outcomes for yourself and the market as a whole.
Is there a good place for harness comparison/scoring?
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.
never heard of nanobot. how reliable is this benchmark?
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
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.
Cursor founder just tweeted that he was sad to see this ban and that OpenAI model represented around 5% of total usage.
Burn.
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.
> 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...
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?
It's amusingly ironic to talk about "IP theft" in the context of AI models.
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.
Does Grok have a subscription that competes with Claude Max $100 plan (genuinely curious)
> 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.
Before, but they say that they’re also not going to provide astra to cursor subscribers
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.
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.
Damn; Cursor has basically no value if Anthropic pulls the same move. Twitter Part 2 indeed.
Anthropic rents a lot of capacity from xAI, so I don't think they're in a position to do the same.
This low key confirms Astra for November
> 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?
OpenAI / Sam Altman is probably even shadier than musk
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.
Why would they give the maximum time instead of the minimum given violation has already occurred?
[delayed]
Allowing the company or harness to dictate which models you use is crazy.
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.
This is personal, not business.
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.
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?
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?)
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.
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.
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%.
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.
At least capitalism isn't at the center of the most impactful technological revolution in human history.
Yeah, that’s mostly been driven by socialism
show me a communist country
they’ll see an uptick in codex user count trying the new models and can build a narrative around that too
So Astra release Friday 13th November!?
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.
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.
cursor is pretty garbo 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
I guess I’m on the right track.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835
If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.
Grok? Google?
I'm not a fan of Elon, nor do I use Cursor, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't the only models.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
And to announce it on a Friday night. Brutal.
Sam and Elon have a long standing feud. This is more than just bad blood between companies.
Still, where's the legalese? I'd expect something like this on an individual's blog, not a company's.
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/e...
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?
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.
They already have open models.
Well, one has a pretty popular harness.
Makes sense.
What happened to researchers embracing the open research culture of improving on the results of others?
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.
I use Cursor because I listened to YouTube interviews with the teams behind most of these products and I trusted their team the most.