OpenAI said on Aug. 28 that it had notified SpaceX of its intention to terminate its model-access agreement with Cursor, proposing a cutoff date of Nov. 12, 2026. The company said it was using the maximum notice allowed under its contract with Cursor after SpaceX completed its acquisition of Cursor parent Anysphere.
The decision follows SpaceX’s roughly $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, which Cursor confirmed on Aug. 14 had officially closed. OpenAI said the ownership change activated a contractual cancellation window and cited concerns about whether SpaceX would comply with its terms of service, pointing to previous disputes involving other Musk-controlled companies, including Twitter and xAI.
OpenAI also said it would not provide future models to Cursor during the transition, including Astra, its upcoming model. Cursor co-founder Michael Truell said discussions with OpenAI were continuing and expressed disappointment, adding that OpenAI models currently account for about 5% of Cursor user traffic.
Cursor remains operational and supports models from Anthropic and Google; Anthropic said it plans to expand Claude compute capacity on the platform. OpenAI, meanwhile, is investing more heavily in its own Codex coding agent, intensifying vertical competition in AI developer tools.
The dispute has revived long-running tensions between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, with Musk again attacking Altman as “utterly untrustworthy” amid broader legal battles over OpenAI’s direction. For now, OpenAI models remain available through OpenAI’s own products and API, but direct Cursor access is set to end unless the two sides reach an alternative arrangement before November 12, 2026.
