When SpaceX announced last month agreed to purchase popular AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, investors believed the deal would be a boon for both companies. Cursor would benefit from gaining the computing resources of a enormous AI lab that it could employ to train its own models. In turn, SpaceX and Elon Musk will own one of the most popular AI development tools on the market.
What was less clear was whether Cursor could remain an open platform after the deal, or whether rival AI labs would continue to let it offer their models. Third-party AI models have historically played a key role in Cursor’s business. While the company started operations training your own artificial intelligence 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 coding assistant.
This strategy allowed Cursor to offer customers whichever model was best or cheapest at a given time. This also benefited Anthropic and OpenAI, which count Cursor among their largest customers are characterized by startup clearly in your marketing materials.
According to people close to Cursor, once the SpaceX acquisition is finalized later this year, Cursor hopes to continue operating its AI coding product as a platform – supporting models from Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs alongside its own.
I have my doubts about how this will actually play out, but whether Cursor will remain model agnostic remains one of the biggest questions hanging over the AI industry.
Eno Reyes, co-founder and chief technology officer at Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, says he’s not sure SpaceX rivals will automatically cut Cursor just because it’s owned by a rival AI lab. “I don’t know if the decision is black and white,” Eno tells me. “It’s actually very unclear to us.”
Cursor declined to comment for this story. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Creating enemies
This isn’t the first time Cursor’s relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been tested. Historically, Cursor has complemented AI labs by distributing their models through its coding platform. However, it is now increasingly in direct competition with them, as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code have become their main businesses. The SpaceX acquisition will likely only intensify this rivalry.
SpaceX and Cursor can’t say much about how they will operate after the acquisition, in part because the deal has not yet been finalized and is subject to “required regulatory approvals,” according to SpaceX documents. filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, SpaceX is poised to take over Cursor’s assets, customer contracts and intellectual property, which means OpenAI and Anthropic will now have to do business with Musk if they want to reach Cursor users.
Once the acquisition is finalized, it’s possible that SpaceX decides it doesn’t want to direct business to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its biggest competitors in the pioneering artificial intelligence development space. Anthropic and OpenAI may say they do not want to sell their artificial intelligence models through a Musk-owned product, which both companies’ CEOs Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have clashed with in the past.
Historically, AI labs have not done well when it comes to selling AI models to each other. Last year, Anthropic made quick work of it cut off access to windsurfing after news broke that OpenAI was acquiring an AI coding startup (the deal ultimately fell through). Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan said at the time that “it would be weird to sell Claude to OpenAI.Since then, Anthropic has been working on limiting OpenAI and SpaceX from using Claude AI models.