OpenAI will stop supplying its models to the AI coding tool Cursor on November 12, 2026, and will not provide future models to the service at all. OpenAI announced the decision late on Friday, August 28, roughly two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor parent Anysphere on August 14.
OpenAI's stated reason is trust, not performance or price. OpenAI said it cannot be confident SpaceX will use its technology within its terms of service, "based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts." OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux put it more bluntly: "It boils down to trust."
The two contract breaches OpenAI names
OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents, both predating the Cursor deal. The first: after Musk acquired Twitter — since folded into SpaceX — the company broke the terms of a data licensing agreement, cutting OpenAI's Twitter data access in December 2022 after deciding the arrangement, reported at roughly $2 million a year, was underpriced.
The second is more recent and more directly about models. Under cross-examination this year, Musk acknowledged that xAI had trained on other labs' model outputs — a practice known as distillation, and one OpenAI's terms of service prohibit. Musk made the admission under oath in his litigation against OpenAI. His companies have litigated against OpenAI on a separate track as well, where a judge dismissed xAI's trade-secret suit with prejudice.
OpenAI also framed the cutoff as a safety decision, citing the accountability standards attached to its forthcoming Astra model, which carries advanced cyber capabilities. Astra will not be supplied to Cursor at all.
What it actually costs Cursor
Cursor co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said OpenAI models account for roughly 5% of the tool's AI traffic, and that Cursor "was one of the very first users of OpenAI, we've worked closely with their team for years," per CNBC. Cursor's default stack already leans on Anthropic's and Google's models, and since July it has shipped Grok 4.5.
Individual developers are not fully cut off either: users can still reach GPT models inside Cursor through their own OpenAI API keys, and OpenAI will continue to provide access through its IDE extensions for Cursor.
Cursor was founded in 2022 by Truell and three MIT classmates, and by late April it had passed a $3 billion annualized revenue run rate with more than 3,000 customers paying at least $100,000 a year.
Its biggest model supplier moved the other way. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown wrote on X that Anthropic will continue to expand compute capacity for Claude models in Cursor. Anthropic set the precedent for a cutoff like OpenAI's in June 2025, when it blocked the rival coding tool Windsurf from accessing Claude.
The notice period, and the rule that does not cover it
European Cursor developers get roughly 75 days between the announcement and the cutoff — but that number comes from OpenAI's contract, not from law. As The Next Web reported, EU cloud-switching rules require two months' notice and a 30-day data portability window when a customer leaves a provider. They do not cover the reverse case, in which a supplier unilaterally terminates service. There is no statutory floor underneath the 75 days. It is also unsettled whether a model API falls under those rules at all — the definition sweeps in as-a-service products broadly, and no regulator has ruled on the question.
Source: CNBC, The Decoder, OpenAI
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