When SpaceX introduced final month that it had agreed to acquire the favored AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, traders believed the deal could be a boon for each corporations. Cursor would profit from getting the computing assets of a serious AI lab, which it might use to coach its personal fashions. In flip, SpaceX and Elon Musk would personal one of the vital fashionable AI developer instruments in the marketplace.
What was much less clear was whether or not Cursor might stay an open platform after the deal, or if rival AI labs would proceed letting it provide their fashions. Third-party AI fashions have traditionally performed a vital position in Cursor’s enterprise. Whereas the corporate has began training its own AI models in recent times, it has all the time allowed customers to select from quite a lot of choices from Anthropic, OpenAI, and different AI labs to energy its coding assistant.
That technique allowed Cursor to supply clients whichever mannequin was the very best, or least expensive, at a given second. It additionally benefited Anthropic and OpenAI, which each depend Cursor amongst their largest clients and feature the startup prominently of their advertising and marketing supplies.
After SpaceX’s acquisition is finalized later this 12 months, Cursor hopes to proceed working its AI coding product as a platform—serving fashions from Anthropic, OpenAI, and different AI labs alongside its personal—in keeping with folks near Cursor.
I’ve my doubts about how this can really play out, however whether or not or not Cursor stays mannequin agnostic is among the largest questions hanging over the AI trade.
Eno Reyes, the cofounder and chief know-how officer of Manufacturing unit, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, says he’s not sure that SpaceX’s rivals will robotically lower Cursor off simply because it is going to be owned by a competing AI lab. “I do not know if the choice is as black and white,” Reyes tells me. “It’s really tremendous unclear to us.”
Cursor declined to remark for this story. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Making Frenemies
This isn’t the primary time that Cursor’s relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been examined. Traditionally, Cursor complemented the AI labs by distributing their fashions by way of its coding platform. However now it has more and more discovered itself in direct competitors with them as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code have grow to be main traces of their respective companies. The SpaceX acquisition will seemingly solely intensify that rivalry.
SpaceX and Cursor can’t say rather a lot about how they’ll function post-acquisition, partly, as a result of the deal has not but closed and stays topic to “requisite regulatory approvals,” in keeping with paperwork SpaceX filed with the US Securities and Change Fee. However SpaceX is poised to get Cursor’s belongings, buyer contracts, and mental property—that means that OpenAI and Anthropic will now must do enterprise with Musk in the event that they need to attain Cursor’s customers.
As soon as the acquisition is finalized, it’s potential SpaceX will determine it doesn’t need to ship enterprise in the direction of Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its largest rivals within the frontier AI growth area. Anthropic and OpenAI could decide they’re unwilling to promote their AI fashions by way of a product owned by Musk, who each corporations’ CEOs, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, have butted heads with prior to now.
Traditionally, AI labs haven’t performed properly on the subject of promoting AI fashions to at least one one other. Final 12 months, Anthropic was fast to cut off access to Windsurf after information broke that OpenAI was buying the AI coding startup (the deal in the end didn’t pan out). Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan stated on the time that it “would be odd to sell Claude to OpenAI.” Within the months since, Anthropic has labored to restrict OpenAI and SpaceX from utilizing its Claude AI fashions.
