OpenAI cuts off SpaceX‑owned Cursor, citing distrust of Musk's companies

OpenAI announced it will end its partnership with Cursor, the AI‑coding platform acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, and will disable access to its models on November 12. The decision was framed as a trust issue, referencing prior contract violations by Elon Musk's firms. Musk downplayed the move, saying he is not concerned about OpenAI's actions.

OpenAI said late Friday it is ending its partnership with Cursor and will cut the AI coding tool's access to its models on November 12. The decision lands two weeks after SPCX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere, Cursor's parent, folding the product into Elon Musk's SpaceXAI division. OpenAI framed the split as a question of trust rather than technology, writing that it cannot be confident SpaceX will use its technology within the terms of service "based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts" .

The deal history explains why Cursor was worth that much to SpaceX. The two companies first struck an agreement in April that gave SpaceX an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI every time a developer used the product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly equivalent to a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that could train an in-house model instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and closed the transaction in mid-August .

Cutting off OpenAI's models narrows what Cursor can route to. The product now leans harder on Anthropic's Claude, which has its own compute arrangement with SpaceX, and on Cursor's in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX compute was meant to accelerate in the first place. Cursor chief executive Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI . Musk, for his part, said on Saturday that he is not concerned about the decision .

The unresolved question is whether Anthropic makes the same call. Cursor's model supply is now concentrated in a single external provider that is also a direct competitor to SpaceXAI's own ambitions, and Musk reportedly told Cursor staff that Grok is playing catch-up and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch . Watch for any change in Anthropic's terms with Cursor, and for how quickly the Composer model can absorb the workload OpenAI stops serving on November 12.

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