When SpaceX announced last month that it had agreed to acquire the popular AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, investors believed the deal would be a boon for both companies. Cursor would benefit from getting the computing resources of a major AI lab, which it could use to train its own models. In turn, SpaceX and Elon Musk would own one of the most popular AI developer tools on the market.
What was less clear was whether Cursor could remain an open platform after the deal, or if rival AI labs would continue letting it offer their models. Third-party AI models have historically played a critical role in Cursor’s business. While the company has started training its own AI models in recent years, it has always allowed users to choose from a variety of offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI labs to power its coding assistant.
That strategy allowed Cursor to offer customers whichever model was the best, or cheapest, at a given moment. It also benefited Anthropic and OpenAI, which both count Cursor among their largest customers and feature the startup prominently in their marketing materials.
After SpaceX’s acquisition is finalized later this year, Cursor hopes to continue operating its AI coding product as a platform—serving models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI labs alongside its own—according to people close to Cursor.
I have my doubts about how this will actually play out, but whether or not Cursor remains model agnostic is one of the biggest questions hanging over the AI industry.
Eno Reyes, the cofounder and chief technology officer of Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, says he’s not certain that SpaceX’s rivals will automatically cut Cursor off just because it will be owned by a competing AI lab. “I don’t know if the decision is as black and white,” Reyes tells me. “It’s actually super unclear to us.”
Cursor declined to comment for this story. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Making Frenemies
This is not the first time that Cursor’s relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been tested. Historically, Cursor complemented the AI labs by distributing their models through its coding platform. But now it has increasingly found itself in direct competition with them as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code have become major lines of their respective businesses. The SpaceX acquisition will likely only intensify that rivalry.
SpaceX and Cursor can’t say a lot about how they’ll operate post-acquisition, in part, because the deal has not yet closed and remains subject to “requisite regulatory approvals,” according to documents SpaceX filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. But SpaceX is poised to get Cursor’s assets, customer contracts, and intellectual property—meaning that OpenAI and Anthropic will now have to do business with Musk if they want to reach Cursor’s users.
Once the acquisition is finalized, it’s possible SpaceX will decide it doesn’t want to send business towards Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its biggest competitors in the frontier AI development space. Anthropic and OpenAI may determine they are unwilling to sell their AI models through a product owned by Musk, who both companies’ CEOs, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, have butted heads with in the past.
Historically, AI labs have not played nicely when it comes to selling AI models to one another. Last year, Anthropic was quick to cut off access to Windsurf after news broke that OpenAI was acquiring the AI coding startup (the deal ultimately didn’t pan out). Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan said at the time that it “would be odd to sell Claude to OpenAI.” In the months since, Anthropic has worked to limit OpenAI and SpaceX from using its Claude AI models.
