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Musk Buys the Coding Tool, OpenAI Slams the Door in his face
SpaceX just closed a $60 billion deal to buy Anysphere, the company behind the coding tool Cursor. Cool, exciting, whatever. Except OpenAI heard about it and basically said “not so fast” and told Cursor it’s cutting off model access on November 12. So the honeymoon lasted about as long as it takes to sign the paperwork.
The Reason… “We Don’t Trust You, Elon”
OpenAI didn’t even try to be subtle about why. Its official line is that it can’t be confident SpaceX will follow the terms of service, and it name-dropped Musk’s companies directly as the reason. The receipts include Musk admitting under oath that xAI trained Grok using OpenAI’s own outputs, which is exactly the kind of “distillation” move OpenAI’s contracts forbid. Petty? Maybe. Also probably fair.
Five Percent Is Not the End of the World
Cursor’s CEO Michael Truell tried to laugh this off, pointing out OpenAI models only make up about five percent of Cursor’s traffic these days. Most developers were already leaning on Claude or Gemini anyway. So this isn’t some catastrophic outage, it’s more like your least favorite coworker quitting and everyone quietly being fine with it.
Anthropic Suddenly Wants to Be Best Friends
Right on cue, Anthropic swooped in offering Cursor more Claude capacity and support. Which is a little rich considering Anthropic pulled the exact same move on Windsurf last year when OpenAI tried to buy it. Everybody in this industry loves loyalty until it’s inconvenient, then they remember they’re competitors.
This Was Always About Compute, Not Feelings
Under the drama there’s a much less emotional story. SpaceX is building out its Colossus compute clusters aiming for something like a million H100-equivalent chips, and Cursor had already said it needed serious dedicated compute to train its own models. Owning the app and the chips means SpaceX doesn’t need to rent intelligence from a rival anymore. Vertical integration, same playbook Musk used to gut launch costs, just pointed at AI this time.
What Actually Changes on November 12
Existing OpenAI models stay available to Cursor until the cutoff date, but nothing new gets added after that. Developers who still default to GPT inside Cursor will need to either bring their own OpenAI API key billed straight to their own account, or just switch over to Claude, Gemini, or SpaceX’s own Grok models, which are apparently getting baked in as the new default. None of that is hard, it just means picking a new favorite intern.
Still Very Much Developing
Cursor says it’s “in talks” with OpenAI to patch things up, which in corporate speak usually means nothing happens until the deadline forces someone’s hand. Given the history between Musk and Altman, don’t expect a group hug anytime soon.
Sources: TipRanks, Forbes, 24/7 Wall St., The Decoder