Congratulations on the launch. The engineering quality is clearly high, and a whitepaper detailing the router observations, how it was designed and why would be a fascinating read.
My primary concern is the rollout communication.
Cursor’s “Auto”, to me, used to mean “cheap flat rate, don’t worry which model actually ran behind the scenes”. I emphasized used to because as of today, this no longer holds.
The now legacy “Auto” behavior seems to be “Auto Cost”?
If correct, I propose the new “Auto Cost” setting should ideally be aliased to the standard “Auto” that people are accustomed to.
This would prevent long-time users and newcomers alike from having to completely update their understanding of how the feature works - those who have been using Cursor for years now (like myself) or those just starting to use it, but also learning from Cursor veterans don’t have to suddenly change their mental model of “Auto”.
Historically, “Auto” meant a predictable, cheap flat rate regardless of the underlying model. Operating under that assumption today (July 22, 2026) is a significant financial risk.
It could also be my Cursor setup, but my “Auto” setting migrated to “Auto Balance” - which immediately started to draw frontier rates from my API tiers, which was very surprising and new behavior to me.
I will even be bold and say, this could end up with a lot of complaints! As of 2026-07-22 19:06 PST, I have not seen any banner, toast notifications, popups or emails notifying people that Cursor’s Auto behaves like this:
Balance and Intelligence now bills at whatever model the router actually picks and **draws from your API usage tier**.
So if you're still on "Auto" and see "GPT-5.6 Sol (Auto Balanced)" billed to your account under On-Demand, that's now **expected**: while you didn't pick Sol manually, Cursor's "Auto Balance" (which I believe is the default?) did, at Sol's API rates and billed you for it.
If I’m in the minority, surprised that “Auto” now bills me frontier rates, that’s fine. I just hope, I’m indeed in the minority.
Otherwise, I’m afraid, people would be excited about all this functionality being available under “Auto”, assume that, the now legacy “Auto” behavior, still applies, go “all out” and then be surprised at the invoice - it just doesn’t hold any longer for 2/3 Auto options.