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When SpaceX announced Last month it was I agreed to the takeover Popular AI coding startup Indicator For $60 billion, investors believe the deal will be a boon for both companies. Cursor will benefit from access to the computing resources of a major AI lab, which it can use to train its own models. In return, SpaceX and Elon Musk will have one of the most popular AI development tools on the market.
What’s less clear is whether Cursor can remain an open platform after the deal, or whether competing AI labs will continue to be allowed to submit their models. Third-party AI models have historically played a critical role in Cursor’s business. While the company started Train its own AI models In recent years, it has always allowed users to choose from a variety of offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI labs to power its programming assistant.
This strategy allowed Cursor to offer customers which model was the best, or cheapest, at a given moment. This has also benefited Anthropic and OpenAI, which count Cursor among their largest clients Startup feature prominently In their marketing materials.
After completing the SpaceX acquisition later this year, Cursor hopes to continue operating its AI coding product as a platform — serving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs alongside its own labs — according to people close to Cursor.
I have my doubts about how this will actually happen, but whether or not Cursor will remain model agnostic remains one of the biggest questions hanging over the AI industry.
Eno Reyes, co-founder and CTO of Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, says he’s not sure SpaceX’s rivals will automatically cut off Cursor’s service just because it will be owned by a rival AI lab. “I don’t know if the decision will be black and white,” Eno told me. “It’s actually very unclear to us.”
The Index declined to comment on this story. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Making enemies
This isn’t the first time Cursor’s relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been tested. Historically, Cursor has supplemented AI labs by distributing its models through its own programming platform. But it now increasingly finds itself in direct competition with OpenAI Codex Alimentarius And the anthropic Claude Code They became the main lines of their own business. The SpaceX acquisition is likely to intensify this rivalry.
SpaceX and Cursor can’t say much about how they will operate post-acquisition, in part because the deal has not yet closed and remains subject to “required regulatory approvals,” according to SpaceX documents. foot With the US Securities and Exchange Commission. But SpaceX is poised to acquire Cursor’s assets, customer contracts, and intellectual property, meaning OpenAI and Anthropic will now have to deal with Musk if they want access to Cursor users.
Once the acquisition is completed, SpaceX could decide it doesn’t want to send its business toward Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its biggest competitors in frontier AI development. Anthropic and OpenAI may decide they are unwilling to sell their AI models through a Musk-owned product, which the companies’ CEOs, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, have feuded with in the past.
Historically, AI labs have not played well when it comes to selling AI models to each other. Last year, Anthropic jumped on it Cut off access to Windsurf After news broke that OpenAI was acquiring an AI coding startup (the deal ultimately didn’t work out). Jared Kaplan, one of Anthropy’s co-founders, said at the time: “It would be strange to sell Claude to OpenAI.In the months that followed, Anthropic worked to the limit OpenAI and SpaceX From the use of Claude AI models.
