OpenAI Cuts Ties with SpaceX’s Cursor
OpenAI announced on Friday its intention to cease supplying AI models to Cursor, the coding-tool company currently under the ownership of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. This decision marks a significant intensification of the ongoing rivalry between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk. SpaceX has finalised its acquisition of Anysphere, the startup responsible for Cursor, in a transaction valued at $60 billion, structured as an all-stock deal initially announced in June. “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 said in a blog post.
Michael Truell, a co-founder of Cursor and now an executive at SpaceX, said that they were speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this issue. “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 said in an X post on Friday. Musk and Altman have been in conflict for years, a rivalry that reached its peak in a trial. During the trial, Musk’s lawyer asserted that Musk and other witnesses had testified that Altman was a liar, whereas OpenAI contended that Musk had sought control of the company. Musk, the world’s richest person, had sued OpenAI for $150 billion, accusing the company and Altman of “stealing a charity” by betraying its original nonprofit mission for their own enrichment.
A federal jury ruled against Musk earlier this year, determining that he had submitted the case beyond the acceptable timeframe. In its blog post, OpenAI stated that X, previously referred to as Twitter and now under the ownership of SpaceX, had violated the terms of its agreement with OpenAI following Musk’s acquisition of the platform. “To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale,” the AI company added.
The ChatGPT-maker indicated that it suggested a shutoff date of November 12, 2026, noting that its agreement with Cursor provided a limited timeframe to terminate the contract in the event of “a change of control.” Cursor provides Grok models created in collaboration with SpaceXAI as part of its first-party offerings, while also enabling users to utilise frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, as stated on its website.
