OpenAI to end Cursor model access after SpaceX deal

OpenAI plans to stop serving its models through the Cursor editor on November 12, ending a nearly four-year arrangement after SpaceX acquired Cursor's maker, Anysphere, for about $60 billion in August. OpenAI said it invoked a change-of-control clause because it "cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service," citing past contract and terms-of-service violations by other Musk-owned companies now under SpaceX, including X and xAI.

The cutoff is narrower than it first looks. Cursor CEO Michael Truell put OpenAI models at about 5% of Cursor user traffic, with most work already running on Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, xAI's Grok, or Cursor's own Composer model. Anthropic moved to keep it that way. Chief compute officer Tom Brown posted that Cursor "has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5" and that Anthropic will "continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor."

For developers, the practical impact is limited but real. OpenAI is giving the maximum notice its contract allows, so GPT model access inside Cursor keeps working until November 12. New OpenAI models released before that date will not show up in Cursor, and anyone routing specific workflows through GPT models there has about ten weeks to move them to another provider or another editor. Truell said Cursor is still speaking with OpenAI to resolve the situation.