A $60 Billion Deal Brings Uncertainty Over Open Platform
When SpaceX announced last month that it had agreed to acquire the popular AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, investors saw the deal as a win for both sides. Cursor would gain access to the computing resources of a major AI lab, allowing it to train its own models. SpaceX and Elon Musk would gain ownership of one of the most widely used AI developer tools on the market.
But a key question remains: can Cursor stay an open platform after the acquisition, or will rival AI labs stop letting it offer their models? Third-party models have been central to Cursor's business. Though the company has started training its own AI models in recent years, it has always let users choose from options provided by Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI labs to power its coding assistant.
That strategy let Cursor offer customers whichever model was best or cheapest at any given time. It also helped Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which count Cursor among their largest customers and feature the startup prominently in their marketing.
After the deal closes later this year, Cursor hopes to keep operating its AI coding product as a platform, serving models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others alongside its own, according to people familiar with the startup. Whether or not Cursor remains model-agnostic is one of the biggest unanswered questions in the AI industry.
Eno Reyes, cofounder and CTO of Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, said he is not certain that SpaceX's rivals will automatically cut off Cursor just because it will belong to a competing AI lab. "I don't know if the decision is as black and white," Reyes said. "It's actually super unclear to us."
Cursor declined to comment for this story. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
A Complicated History Between Frenemies
This is not the first time Cursor's relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been tested. Historically, Cursor complemented the AI labs by distributing their models through its coding platform. But it has increasingly found itself in direct competition with them as OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code have become major lines of their respective businesses. The SpaceX acquisition will likely only intensify that rivalry.
SpaceX and Cursor cannot say much about how they will operate after the deal, in part because it has not yet closed and remains subject to "requisite regulatory approvals," according to documents SpaceX filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. SpaceX is poised to get Cursor's assets, customer contracts, and intellectual property. That means OpenAI and Anthropic will now have to do business with Musk if they want to reach Cursor's users.
Once the acquisition is finalized, SpaceX might decide it does not want to send business to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its biggest competitors in frontier AI development. Anthropic and OpenAI may determine they are unwilling to sell their AI models through a product owned by Musk, whose CEOs Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have butted heads with in the past.
Historically, AI labs have not been generous when it comes to selling AI models to one another. Last year, Anthropic was quick to cut off access to Windsurf after news broke that OpenAI was acquiring that AI coding startup (the deal ultimately did not go through). Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan said at the time that it "would be odd to sell Claude to OpenAI." In the months since, Anthropic has worked to limit OpenAI and SpaceX from using its Claude AI models.
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But times may be changing. Anthropic recently struck a multi-billion dollar deal to buy computing resources from SpaceX, which suggests that Amodei and Musk may be willing to put aside their differences for the sake of beating their mutual enemy: OpenAI. That compute partnership may be reason enough for Anthropic to keep offering its AI models in Cursor.
OpenAI may have its own reasons to continue working with Cursor. The startup is a major partner of OpenAI, and the AI lab's executives held preliminary discussions about acquiring it in the past. OpenAI's startup fund was also one of the earliest investors in Cursor, participating in the company's seed and Series A funding rounds. That startup fund is poised to see a significant return on its Cursor investment in the form of SpaceX stock as a result of the acquisition, according to people close to Cursor.
OpenAI says on its website that the company itself is not directly an investor in OpenAI's startup fund, which was originally set up and managed by Altman. The startup fund receives investment from outside parties, such as Microsoft, as well as other OpenAI partners.
The Importance of Independence
Palantir CEO Alex Karp highlighted a broader concern in a viral CNBC appearance this week: businesses are getting tired of being locked into frontier AI labs and want more options.
Reyes, the Factory CTO, said that "model independence" the ability to avoid being tied to any one AI lab's technology is important to the Fortune 500 companies he speaks with because it offers them flexibility. Reyes believes this is one of the key advantages that independent AI coding startups like his have over the major AI labs. In the past, Cursor has also highlighted its independence as an advantage.
However, there are significant benefits to working with an AI lab directly and being more than just a platform. Cursor CEO Michael Truell announced at its Compile conference last month that the startup is already partnering with SpaceX to train its next AI model, which will use ten to twenty times more computing power than the company could previously access. The hope is that will make the new model comparable, or even better, than what OpenAI and Anthropic are offering. In a blog post from April, Cursor said its lack of computing resources has been holding it back, and it now believes it can dramatically improve its models by relying on SpaceX's data centers.
At the Compile conference, Truell added that Cursor is training its new AI model to be "intelligent beyond coding." Over the last year, Cursor has started targeting other potential customer demographics beyond software engineers, shipping features catered toward people like graphic designers. After the acquisition closes, it would not be surprising if Cursor effectively becomes an enterprise AI arm of SpaceX.
Another factor to consider: smaller AI coding startups are struggling to compete right now with the highly subsidized AI coding subscriptions that OpenAI and Anthropic offer developers. WIRED previously reported that OpenAI and Anthropic's $200 monthly subscription plan can provide coders with well over $1000 of model usage. Now that Cursor is part of SpaceX, it may also be able to offer similarly aggressive pricing.
When the reporter visited Cursor's office a few months ago, shortly before news broke about the SpaceX acquisition, the main problem was that the startup did not have enough capital and computing power to achieve its lofty ambitions. Cursor is likely better off inside SpaceX, even if it loses its relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic. But if Cursor can play nice and compete fiercely at the same time, this might end up being one of the great acquisitions of the AI era.