SpaceX’s agreement to acquire Cursor for $60 billion puts one of the most popular AI developer tools at the center of a much larger strategic question: can an AI coding platform stay open when it is owned by a major AI competitor?
Cursor has built its product around choice. Users have been able to power its coding assistant with models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI labs, while Cursor has also started training its own AI models in recent years. That mix helped the company offer customers whichever model looked strongest or cheapest at a given moment.
The open platform question
After the acquisition is finalized later this year, Cursor hopes to keep running as a platform that serves models from Anthropic, OpenAI, other AI labs, and its own systems, according to people close to Cursor. That ambition matters because third-party AI models have historically been central to Cursor’s business.
The current arrangement has not only helped Cursor. Anthropic and OpenAI both count Cursor among their largest customers and have featured the startup prominently in their marketing materials. Cursor gave those labs distribution inside a tool used by developers, while Cursor benefited from access to frontier models without relying only on its own training work.
But ownership changes the incentives. If SpaceX controls Cursor, OpenAI and Anthropic would have to decide whether they still want their models sold through a product owned by Elon Musk. SpaceX would also have to decide whether it wants to route business toward Anthropic and OpenAI, described in the source as two of its biggest competitors in frontier AI development.
Cursor declined to comment for the story. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Partners are becoming rivals
Cursor’s relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic was already more complicated before the SpaceX deal. The startup historically complemented the labs by distributing their models through its coding platform. Now it competes more directly with them as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code have become major lines of their respective businesses.
The acquisition is likely to sharpen that rivalry. Documents SpaceX filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission say the deal remains subject to “requisite regulatory approvals.” Those same documents point to SpaceX getting Cursor’s assets, customer contracts, and intellectual property.
That means the companies around Cursor are not just negotiating access to a software product. They are negotiating access to users, contracts, and a fast-growing AI coding market where platform placement can matter.
Eno Reyes, the cofounder and chief technology officer of Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, does not see the outcome as automatic. “I don't know if the decision is as black and white,” Reyes said. “It’s actually super unclear to us.”
Why Anthropic and OpenAI might stay
There are reasons the major labs could walk away. The source notes that AI labs have historically been cautious about selling models to one another. Last year, Anthropic cut off access to Windsurf after news broke that OpenAI was acquiring the AI coding startup, though that deal ultimately did not happen. Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan said at the time that it “would be odd to sell Claude to OpenAI.”
Anthropic has also worked in the months since to limit OpenAI and SpaceX from using its Claude AI models. That history suggests Cursor’s future access to Claude cannot be taken for granted once SpaceX owns the company.
At the same time, the source points to a different possibility. Anthropic recently struck a multi-billion dollar deal to buy computing resources from SpaceX. That arrangement suggests Dario Amodei and Musk may be willing to put aside differences when there is a practical reason to do so. The compute partnership could give Anthropic a reason to keep offering its models inside Cursor.
OpenAI may have its own reasons to continue working with Cursor. Cursor is a major OpenAI partner, and OpenAI executives previously held preliminary discussions about acquiring the startup. OpenAI’s startup fund was also one of Cursor’s earliest investors, participating in the company’s seed and Series A funding rounds.
According to people close to Cursor, OpenAI’s startup fund is poised to see a significant return from the acquisition in the form of SpaceX stock. OpenAI says on its website that the company itself is not directly an investor in that startup fund, which was originally set up and managed by Sam Altman. The fund receives investment from outside parties, including Microsoft, as well as other OpenAI partners.
What model independence means now
The Cursor debate fits into a broader concern in the AI industry. Palantir CEO Alex Karp highlighted in a viral CNBC appearance this week that businesses are growing tired of being locked into frontier AI labs and want more options.
Reyes describes “model independence” as the ability to avoid being tied to any one AI lab’s technology. He says that flexibility matters to the Fortune 500 companies he speaks with and sees it as one advantage independent AI coding startups can have over the major labs. Cursor has highlighted its independence as an advantage in the past as well.
For enterprise customers, the logic is straightforward. A model-independent platform can switch between providers when a model improves, pricing changes, or a customer wants a different technical fit. A platform owned by a major AI player may still be useful, but buyers may ask whether its recommendations and integrations remain neutral.
The computing power tradeoff
Cursor also gains something important from SpaceX: computing power. At its Compile conference last month, Cursor CEO Michael Truell said the startup is already partnering with SpaceX to train its next AI model. That model will use ten to twenty times more computing power than Cursor could previously access.
The hope is that the new model can become comparable to, or better than, what OpenAI and Anthropic offer. In an April blog post, Cursor said limited computing resources had been holding it back and that SpaceX’s data centers could help it dramatically improve its models.
Truell also said at Compile that Cursor is training the new model to be “intelligent beyond coding.” Over the last year, Cursor has begun targeting customer groups beyond software engineers, including features catered toward people like graphic designers.
Pricing may also shift. Smaller AI coding startups are struggling to compete with highly subsidized subscriptions from OpenAI and Anthropic. WIRED previously reported that OpenAI and Anthropic’s $200 monthly subscription plan can provide coders with well over $1000 of model usage. As part of SpaceX, Cursor may be able to pursue similarly aggressive pricing.
The result is a difficult tradeoff. Cursor may lose some of the independence that helped define its platform, but SpaceX could give it the resources to build stronger models, broaden its audience, and compete harder. The next phase depends on whether Cursor can keep working with rival labs while also becoming a more direct competitor to them.