OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor After SpaceX's $60 Billion Acquisition

OpenAI has announced it will terminate on November 12, 2026, the agreement that gives Cursor's developers access to its language models. The decision comes weeks after SpaceX finalized its acquisition of Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI coding assistant, in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion.

What OpenAI announced

In an official statement, OpenAI said it cannot be confident that SpaceX will use its technology in accordance with its terms of service. The company pointed to past experience with companies controlled by Elon Musk that it said had violated agreement terms.

We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology in accordance with our usage policies, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating agreements - OpenAI

It is a rare case of a major language model provider publicly and explicitly justifying the end of a commercial partnership by citing a lack of trust in the counterparty, rather than business or technical reasons. OpenAI did not specify which violations it was referring to, but the backdrop is the long-running and increasingly tense conflict between Sam Altman and Musk.

The road to acquisition

SpaceX and Cursor began working together in April 2026, when Musk's rocket company gave the startup access to xAI's Colossus computing infrastructure to help train Cursor's own coding models, such as Composer. The agreement included an option for SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60 billion.

Two months later, shortly after SpaceX's stock market debut, both sides confirmed they were moving forward with the deal. The acquisition closed on August 14, 2026, as an all-stock transaction with no cash involved, making it one of the largest deals in the history of the AI coding tools sector.

The scale of Cursor's business

Cursor, developed by Anysphere, ranks among the fastest-growing software products of recent years. Its annual revenue reached roughly $3 billion by late April 2026, with full-year projections of around $6 billion, of which $2.6 billion was expected to come from enterprise contracts. As recently as November 2025, the startup was valued at $29.3 billion, underscoring how quickly its worth grew ahead of the acquisition.

For developers using Cursor, this means a tool that has so far combined models from multiple providers, including OpenAI's GPT, will need to shift to other backends. The natural candidate is Grok, the model developed by xAI, Musk's company now tied to SpaceX through shared computing infrastructure.

What it means for the market

OpenAI's decision reflects a broader industry trend: AI labs increasingly treat access to their models as a matter of strategic rivalry rather than a neutral infrastructure service. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are building their own vertically integrated technology stacks and are willing to cut off competitors or partners tied to rivals, even at the cost of losing model licensing revenue.

For Polish companies and developers using Cursor, the practical impact will only become clear after November 12, when OpenAI actually disables access to its models within the tool. Until then, Cursor will have to either negotiate an extension of the agreement or convince users that the models offered through the SpaceX and xAI ecosystem match GPT in quality.

The episode also shows how much the personal conflict between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, OpenAI's co-founder who left the company and has remained locked in legal and public disputes with it for years, shapes business decisions affecting millions of users of both companies' commercial products.