Cursor Composer 1 was Qwen and this is Kimi. IDE is based on VSCode. The entire company is build on packaging open source and reselling it.<p>Ollama is also doing this.<p>There is so much money to be made repackaging open source these days.<p>So funny to see Twitter go wild saying "a 50 person team just beat Anthropic" blah blah.
> Cursor Composer 1 was Qwen and this is Kimi. IDE is based on VSCode. The entire company is build on packaging open source and reselling it.<p>The question is, where's the outrage? Why are there no headlines "USA steals Chinese tech?" "All USA can do is make a cheap copy of Chinese SOTA models".<p>> So funny to see Twitter go wild saying "a 50 person team just beat Anthropic" blah blah.<p>Well, if it's an American company, then it's a noble underdog story. When Chinese do it, they are thieves leeching on the US tech investment.<p>It's all so predictable, even the comments here.
> packaging open source and reselling it.<p>It's a bit more than that. They have plenty of data to inform any finetunes they make. I don't know how much of a moat it will turn out to be in practice, but it's something. There's a reason every big provider made their own coding harness.
Cursor’s integration is much deeper than just plugging an LLM into VSCode<p>That said I have a feeling both VSCode and Claude code will catch up to their integration. But neither comes close yet (I say that as someone who mainly uses Claude Code).
> Cursor Composer 1 was Qwen...<p>We know Composer 2 is Kimi K2.5 from that tweet. Where is the evidence for Composer 1 being based on Qwen?<p>> So funny to see Twitter go wild saying "a 50 person team just beat Anthropic" blah blah.<p>In this case, it will be the other way round: Anthropic will see Cursor as a competitor AI lab using open weight models for Composor 2 (actually Kimi K2.5) which was allegedly distilled from Opus 4.6, and would be enough for Anthropic to cut off Cursor from using any of models.<p>That's where it is going.
Do you know what Qwen model Composer 1.5 used?
Looks like two Moonshot employees confirmed that it's not licensed before Moonshot made the decision to get out of the debate and delete their posts [0][1].<p>[0] <a href="https://chainthink.cn/zh-CN/news/113784276696010804" rel="nofollow">https://chainthink.cn/zh-CN/news/113784276696010804</a> - may have originally been <a href="https://x.com/apples_jimmy/status/2034920082602864990" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/apples_jimmy/status/2034920082602864990</a><p>[1] <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=medium" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=...</a>
This is on their website...<p>"Is Kimi K2.5 open source?"<p>"Yes, Kimi K2.5 is an open source AI model. Developers and researchers can explore its architecture, build new solutions, and experiment openly. Model weights and code are publicly available on Hugging Face and the official GitHub repository."<p><a href="https://www.kimi.com/ai-models/kimi-k2-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.kimi.com/ai-models/kimi-k2-5</a>
4th paragraph in license block<p>Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works
thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have
more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars
(or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently
display "Kimi K2.5" on the user interface of such product or service.
My first reaction was "well, who knows how much revenue they're actually doing"<p>But at least the rumor mill has them significantly above that line:<p>> Revenue: As of March 2026, reports suggest Cursor has surpassed $2 billion in annualized revenue (ARR).
That's not an open source license, then.
TBH they really shouldn't have posted such a tweet in the first place, just sit back and watch their license enforced by the Internet.<p>I had the question "how do you even enforce this weird license term" back then, I guess I know the answer now.
Cursor is mostly an IDE / coding-agent harness company.
So it probably makes sense for them not to train their own base model, but instead license something like Kimi and fine-tune it for their own harness and workflows.<p>Their moat looks pretty thin. A VSCode fork with an open-source LLM fork on top. In the fast-moving coding-agent market, it’s not obvious they keep their massive valuation forever.
There is a plausible scenario in which software engineering requires a very finite amount of intelligence, in which sota models will be used mainly for other things and where for coding the harness will become increasingly more important than the model.
i've kinda had this thought before but never could express it ("you only need up to a certain level of smartness to express most coding concepts correctly")<p>but it never occurred to me that, if true, of course the harness becomes increasingly more important. which feels absolutely correct of course.<p>not sure if the hypothesis is even true though.
> Their moat looks pretty thin.<p>Their value is in the data they've collected and are collecting. Usage, acceptance rate, and all the connected signals. Plus having a large userbase where they can A / B test any finetune they create.
That's every harness including VC Code Copilot.<p>People home about Teams sucking, but its market share is several times that of Slack because of distribution.<p>I guarantee that Microsoft has even more data.
There were conversations in the team yesterday about how Cursor's cloud agents are still ahead of Claude from a UX perspective.<p>Obviously we're running both, using the right tool for the job.<p>There is stickiness there from being early. That will be hard to replicate.
This is exactly what Cursor should be doing, within the obvious bounds of the law and such. Not everyone needs a pristine foundation model. What a waste of compute. Anthropic & OpenAI need product-level competition to knock them off their $25/Mtok horse.
There are many reasons to make fun of Cursor. <i>However</i>, one of the things get right is their autocomplete model.<p>Are there any open models that come close? Why doesnt OAI or Anthropic dedicate some resources to blowing Cursor's model out of the water? Cursor's completion model is a sticking point for a lot of users.
I agree, their autocomplete (tab) model is the best, but recently I realised I am using it less and less - the new models are so good that I mostly just do agentic coding, and I do very little changes in the codebase by myself. This is probably a general trend and if the usage of autocomplete models is dying out, it's understandable the companies are not investing resources into it.
Antigravity has an autocomplete model too. Based on Windsurf's, I guess.
The model is great. The UX is ~~horrible~~ annoying...
Most companies don't do auto competition these days, including some that just recently stopped offering completion.<p>Which I find very unfortunate. There are so many cases, especially in proprietary codebases with non standard infrastructure, where good autocomplete is much better than "agentic" edits that produce nothing but slop which takes longer to clean up.
is this the model used on free mode?
There's no "just" in RL. Fine tuning is very important and could make a lot of difference.
im pretty sure this is in violation of moonshot's ToS. this is going to be fun to watch unfold
There is no ToS at play here. There's only the license[1], which is MIT modified like so:<p>> Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works
thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have
more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars
(or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently
display "Kimi K2.5" on the user interface of such product or service.<p>[1] - <a href="https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/blob/main/LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/blob/main/LICENS...</a>
Yes, this is pretty clear-cut. There's even a great alternative, namely GLM-5, that does <i>not</i> have such a clause (and other alternatives besides) so it feels a bit problematic that they would use Kimi 2.5 and then disregard that advertisement clause.
At the same time, Moonshot violated Anthropic's ToS by training on their models' outputs :) [0]. And Anthropic violated copyright law by training on copyrighted material. It's violations all the way down.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126614">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126614</a>
They probably licensed it. Still a bit deceptive not to mention it on the model card/blog post, but companies whitelabel all the time without mentioning.<p>It goes against the ML community ethos to obscure it, but is common branding practice.
No they didn't [0][1]. With this leak they're probably negotiating as we speak, which could be why they've deleted the posts.<p>[0] <a href="https://chainthink.cn/zh-CN/news/113784276696010804" rel="nofollow">https://chainthink.cn/zh-CN/news/113784276696010804</a><p>[1] <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=medium" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=...</a>
Kimi K2.5 was released under a modified MIT license (100M+ MAU or $20M+ MRR has to prominently display Kimi K2.5). It will be fine.
Basically this is true for most startups in the world BUT Cursor, so here you are kinda inverting the logic of the matter. Cursor is at a size that, if they wanted to use K2.5, they could clearly state that it was K2.5 or get a license to avoid saying it.
I'm annoyed that we still don't know for certain which base model they used for Cursor 1.<p>This feels really rude to me. I have no problem with them fine-tuning open weight models to create their own - they are getting great results, and Cursor's research term should be respected for that. But deliberately hiding the base model they use is disrespectful of the researchers who created <i>that</i> model.
To be fair, is "with RL", "just"?<p>They should have disclosed it though. If they didn't it's a bad look for sure.
From a users perspective, do we really care what model we're using under the hood? Or how well the software is solving our problems?<p>Seems like cursor is trying to build a "thicker wrapper" beyond the harness. Either to protect against Anthropic shutting them off or increase margins.
A question. I’m due for a yearly Cursor subscription renewal, how does the credit limit look like?<p>Currently I’ve not hit any of the limits despite using it quite rigorously, I wonder if this will change with a renewal?
YC is back at it again.
Moonshot is raising money at a 10B usd valuation, cursor/anysphere is at a 30B usd valuation.
As a paying customer, it just doesn't feel good that they are trying to pass off someone else's model as their own.<p>I mean I guess this is what businesses do all the time. There's a term for it even, it's called white-labeling.<p>But is this all that Cursor have? They pass of VS Code as their own, they pass off Kimi as their own... What do Cursor even do? What do I need them for?
As a paying customer, I don't care where the model comes from, I only care how good it is.
White-labeling may be slightly dishonest to the consumer but the manufacturer and distributor are honest with each other. That doesn't appear to be the case here (Kimi's license requires publicly acknowledging Kimi is used for anyone operating at Cursor's scale).
This whole ai stuff feels like a big bubble especially with the oil price soon at $200 and guaranteed recession.
Scores higher than Opus 4.6 on their in-house benchmark? Sounds legit.
I don't know - it works okay (yet to be tested whether it is actually smarter than Opus 4.6), but it is not bad at all. So far, it works quite fine (I'm not testing the "fast" version).
Their first model was also based on an open source Chinese base model. They never fully trained their own model.
I whish it was GLM 5.0.
Cursor can't compete with Claude Code's subsidized pricing, so they are trying to gaslight people that their cheap model is good enough.
Honestly I don't think this leak is any good for Cursor. Not only this appears as a violation to Moonshot's ToS, this may also be in fact enough evidence for Anthropic to ban Cursor from using their models, just like they are doing to OpenCode.<p>Why? As I said before, Anthropic mentions Moonshot AI (Maker of the Kimi models) as one of the AI labs that were part of this alleged "distillation attack" [0] campaign and will use that reason to cut off Cursor, Just like they did to OpenAI, xAI and OpenCode.<p>Let's see if the market thinks Composor 2 is <i>really</i> that good without the Claude models helping Cursor. (If Anthropic cuts them off).<p>[0] <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...</a>
> this may also be in fact enough evidence for Anthropic to ban Cursor from using their models, just like they are doing to OpenCode.<p>The Anthropic ban on OpenCode isn't an <i>Anthropic</i> ban on OpenCode, it's a ban on using a Calude Code subscription with OpenCode. That's justified (or not) under various ToS arguments, but one can still use OpenCode with the more expensive API access.<p>Anthropic's complaint about distillation attacks is a distinct prong, one not levied against OpenCode. Additionally, the distillation activities described in your link don't describe Cursor's routine use of Anthropic's models. There, the model outputs are a primary product (e.g. the autocompleted code), and any learning signals provided are incidental.
Anthropic's complaint about "distillation" attacks (obligatory scare quotes because training on glorified chat logs is a far cry from actually distilling from model weights you have real access to) is also about ToS violations. Anthropic's ToS, like OpenAI's, forbids you from exploiting interactions with their model for the purpose of building a competitor, even though rumor has it that the AI industry has been doing exactly this for a long time anyway.
Kimi K2.5 is an open source model. It is intended for people to make derivative models.
For all the muh productivity guys that like to claim they can turn invisible when no one is looking, an produce 600k lock over 6 weeks, well...cursor is useless now. We know kimi K2.5 won't make you 100 trillion times faster.<p>Cursor is killed for this market.
A hyped startup providing zero added value, burning investor money only to repackage somebody else's work? That's new... /s