Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: <a href="https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46</a><p>So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models.<p>This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider.<p>It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.
It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.<p>If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.<p>They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.
It's one of the things you need to do if you want your company to later become the only company in the world. They also promised that they would treat you nicely afterwards after they get what they want.
I am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can.<p>Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.<p>It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
And then powerful local LLMs become feasible and everyone and every government self hosts and the megacorps lose all power.<p>Imagine the United States DoD, CIA, NSA training an LLM on all its top secret intel.
Pretty sure?<p>Guy this was openly stated more than a decade and half ago by all the current oligarchs
Companies are well within their rights to choose who they sell to. I don't see how this is 'privately enforced copyright'.<p>Also, copyright has always been privately enforced anyway?
On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, so much of the training data comes from scraping the web that it feels wrong for them to do what they deny others the right to do.<p>On the third hand, the settlement Anthropic famously had to pay was for copyright infringement because they didn't actually have the right to even access some of the training data they used, so I can see how this might be compatible with the law.<p>On the fourth hand, I'm saying that as someone who absolutely isn't a lawyer and sometimes gets surprised when reading about copyright cases that sure sound like they ought to have been trademark cases given my limited understanding.
DMCA? Which is actually an American law enforced globally?<p>Enforcement ultimately happens through law and the legal system.
> If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.<p>I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
Are you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?
They already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?
Only any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
Yes. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use.<p>That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling.<p>>"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
Cursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS:
<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access-to-claude/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access...</a><p>And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason:
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropic-cuts-windsurfs-claude-access-before-openai-acquisition/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi...</a><p>So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
Noone is good here. Mr. Altman built a non-profit organization to help humanity, yes, that is what he said at first...<p>This is a battle for power, let us not be naive...
Anthropic seems to have no issues: <a href="https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20</a>
LOL, obviously Space-cursor-xAI-musk-imperial-holdings-inc is providing them compute. They either _can't_ cut them off, or they know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
Yes Anthropic’s chief compute officer said nice things about one of Anthropic’s chief providers of compute. Recall that compute constraints are one of their existential risks.
Remind me to set up public nitter so I can post a nitter link to whatever this is, and then I can read it.
I suspect it's better for mental health to be lazy and take this as an opportunity to detox from tweet-sized interactions in general.
Not being able to read about Musk doing some shit because Musk have done some shit to Nitter is just peak comedy.<p>Just go ahead and do set it up. You’ll be my hero (I don’t have mental capacity to research which jurisdiction works for this right now, but obviously not in US or EU.)
God I hope so. My workplace enforces Cursor use, and to see it lose GPT and Claude would absolutely make my day. Much has been invested in getting us to "use the right models", a list in which Grok does not feature.
> if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything<p>It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.
Why you would trust Elon Musk to not hack you and steal your model weights is beyond me, but maybe they intend to use that compute just for training, still I’m sure there’s plenty of research there to take too…
i'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer
>Musk admitted to distilling their models.<p>what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
Well, they will stop releasing their latest models, and just attempt to eat all software themselves.<p>Otherwise, it will be competitors distilling, and the government getting upset.<p>It's hard for me to see a different future.<p>And, this really sucks.<p>If this thesis is true, I wonder what the final YC batch number might be.
I believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?<p>Even if they have Astra or whatever completely to themselves, how do they deal with the -product- side? Or sales, or account management?<p>They've been focused on juicing model's coding capabilities, but it's absolutely -not- "gen ai" enough to be doing the whole thing in agents, even 3 or 5 years from now, if only because there's so much context we _can't_ give to these models, without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
They don’t need to make you or me, people who actually make software, believe that every anthropic employee is actually and in fact, right now, a „10x software factory controlling thousands of agents“, they need to make investors and CEOs believe, and then hope that making that true is possible and that they can keep the fiction up long enough and get enough money and infra built out to make it actually true.
Like Uber replaced all drivers with self driving cars [1] in its 20 years of operation? Just because I want to paint the moon pink, doesn't mean it's feasible.<p>[1] If anything, Waymo has a higher chance and global Waymo adoption is probably 20 years into the future, at least.
Just guessing - companies which not outsource development to likes of infosys will outsource to OpenAI instead.
Markets and rationality are sometimes just acquaintances
Anthropic wants you to think that models that distill from them would be worthless otherwise. It’s not true, it’s just one part of the process. The whole narrative that Chinese and other models are only good because they distill is nonsense.
Distilling merely saves an expensive part of the process: hundreds of millions. So even if distilling wasn't a thing, what justifies trillions ?
running on someone else's server, you're basically giving them your weights.
Anthropic runs a significant portion of their compute on xAI hardware - why are you even talking about trying to suggest their relationship is acrimonious?<p>Some of you guys hate Musk so much that you say blatantly nonsensical stuff. Like, how can you be on HN and authoritatively mouthing off and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract, or the fact that xAI took down its own Grok compute capability so it could sell that compute to Anthropic? And if Anthropic hated Musk/xAI as much as you are saying they do, why would they be paying xAI billions for compute? Think/research before typing.
Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms<p>- fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg<p>- in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small<p>- in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by hand.<p>It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor.<p>Also I find that incredibly slow. By the time Claude finished a prompt I could have done a few in cursor.<p>And mind you, I’ve been wanting to use zed instead but the clunky vscode fork called cursor. But cursor has just a better UX for AI integration even though it’s slow and guzzle up RAM.
Cursor no longer indexes your codebase.
Seems you're looking for an editor with agent, not just a agent, so something like Zed?
May be opencode2 in the near future. Sample (not affiliated) ~
1. download opencode2
2. settings > tabs > vertical
3. add worktree setup to agents.md
4. use /diff to review changes
5. use commands for commit, sync and push
Have you tried the continuity plugin to VSCode? I think it’s still rg‘ING the source but you get control over AI edits / review and quick own edits.
There's OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex. I don't like to use GUIs so I rely purely on agentic AI on CLIs.
In the case of TUIs I’m going to assume you review the code externally in neovim or lazy git or something like that?<p>I don’t like relying on GIT for that and making things as good/done as I go. But with these agentic tools that’s what I have to do. Stage everything I like, manually edits a few bits.<p>But what do you when you find something where you want to say the agent: I don’t like this for reasons x and y redo as z. I’m like one shortcut away in context inside cursor to say that to my agent? You have to change tab in herdr and then what? Type the file name and line numbers? Is there a way to do this that does not seem very frustrating?<p>Also open code, codex, etc. super slow. They grep the code. Every. Single. Time. Cursor has a semantic index
I usually copy paste snippet or function name that is affected and comment it. similar like you would sit next to coworker and tried to say where he/she messed up.
agent is able to get location correctly<p>I know this is change of context, but I have full screen terminal toggled with keyboard shortcut and with middle mouse paste (Linux) I do not have to move cursor anywhere
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense. It’s sort of what I do too when I use codex/claude/t3 code, but usually via GUI.<p>The in-editor context review is something that does not seem long for first world. Sadly. Maybe I’ll be forced to make a zed extension or something, maybe on top of jujustu…
Check out JetBrains Air
Codex
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans.<p>Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
I've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.
The TUI version of Claude Code just isn't very good, though. The default keybindings do not work in the majority of terminals (because they generate the same byte sequences for key sequences assigned to different commands). Editing large prompts is rather painful because there doesn't seem to be in-prompt search commands. There is no source code browser, so source code references cannot checked by the users. Diffs cannot be copied directly because they are indented by spaces (even some tools strip indentation from patches, it's still ugly). Switching between conversations is somewhat discouraged by the interface, which makes it harder to keep the context clean.<p>I think it's possible to have a better TUI, with something that isn't modeled after a shell prompt. Apparently, recent updates move in that direction. The GUI version of Claude Code seems to be coming to Linux, too.
I saw that happen culturally. But never saw that much different in performance. And I really dislike terminal development. And their desktop app is really buggy.
Out of interest when did you last use the desktop app? I am a huge daily user of it and apart from very minimal bugs, it works perfectly for me. Wasn't always the case, so they've definitely made improvements
Given you can use the same models on both, you're right about performance.
However I've found the cross-session context and memory in claude code much more helpful which can lead to better outcomes faster.<p>Additionally helpful where 2 apps/repos might require running at the same time, e.g. headless web apps, or, for plugin development where the plugin might be a dedicated repo but needs to run in another app to observe changes and make it re-test itself.<p>I also switched from terminal to the app not that long ago, I don't find it buggy, it has access to a browser which is really helpful.
The tide is turning though. I was using the old non agent view in cursor every day for about a year when I built my startup with it. Then Claude Code blew it out of the water. But since two month or so I much prefer Codex and Cursor with the agent view.<p>However, what I see cooking at Cursor is way more promising than the others. Things like full system understanding, their own forge, multi-repo support. I'd put them as way more visionary in the Gartner magic Quadrant ;)
Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck.<p>In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market.<p>For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come.<p>The cursor model is quite nice because it allows you to switch between cheap and expensive models for different tasks
I think the point is that CC was the first general use, terminal based harness. I think. Now you can use PI, or OpenCode, or whatever, and use any model you like.<p>Now, I’m no expert, because I was late to the game and have only ever used Pi. But I guess Cursor is some product that’s tied to your IDE? If so, then yeah. That’s just too restrictive. I still love my IDE, but I don’t want it to be my harness too.
<i>> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models...</i><p>Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provider instead.<p>Some instructions here:<p><a href="https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude" rel="nofollow">https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude</a><p>That said, I've not actually tried this myself, opting to build my own harness instead. And you don't know what information Claude Code might be sending back to Anthropic about how you use competing models and which models you use. I don't know for sure that they do this, but after hearing about how they used steganography in the date of harness system prompts to identify the user's location, I don't entirely trust Claude Code anymore.
> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models<p>Why do you say that? I've used Claude Code with DeepSeek via OpenRouter just fine.
Cursor has a surprising amount of inertia, though, at least where I work.
I've recently moved to a company that uses Cursor, and I'm actually quite fond of it.<p>I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful.<p>For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.
Well yeah, hence why they started making their own
Enterprise customers are not getting the subsidized subscriptions so for them the point is moot.
Why do people keep insisting that subscription plans are subsidized? They are not. API prices are outrageous, designed to milk enterprise users. They probably have an 80-90% profit margin on subscription plans.<p>Inference is cheap; Dax once said on a podcast that Opencode has a close to 90% profit margin on the openweight models it provides inference for (at 10x cheaper pricing). Those models are close in size and spec to models from large labs.
OpenAI leaked financial data (2025) suggests this - it has $5.7 billion for marketing which 44% of revenue. It’s hard to explain where these billions go other than into subsidised subscription plans and a free tier.
To provide inference, Anthropic and OpenAI need to also constantly spend resources on training new models.<p>If either one of them stops doing that, customers will stop using them, because other models will become better.<p>In other words, there is no point in talking about inference cost in isolation.
Use cursor cli for grok pretty happy with it.
What about openrouter though?
Token reselling stops working when providers literally won't work with you
I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with.<p>Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
If the Opus/Fable harness is superior and it's written using Opus/Fable then it will cease to be a moat. Otherwise the premise for coding using LLMs is essentially untrue.
Couldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality?<p>I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
Cursor charges the “Cursor Token Rate” for BYOK <a href="https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate</a>
No. Its is not for bring your own key.<p>It is for 3rd party models (which you get double the amount of your sub price as usage).<p>Of course they wont charge you extra for BYOK. how would they???
Who are the peoole using this and why is it worth 60b lol
You can just pirate Adobe's software and their marketcap is 115.88B.
Alternate take: open source models and model routers are the real bang for your buck. Subsidized plan or not.
I just told my boss to cancel my cursor subscription. My flow is basically Claude/opencode + kyde/vscode for por changes review<p>Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile
Agreed. Wrapping token spend is great for pumping your revenue numbers (congrats to them on $60B!), but doesn’t seem sustainable over the long term.<p>Big reason we built <a href="https://boxes.dev" rel="nofollow">https://boxes.dev</a> around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.
I may be a rare Cursor user around here, but I am saddened by this news. The thing that keeps me using it is precisely the ability to switch between models: I usually do brainstorm/planning with Sol or Terra, then let Composer (free) deal with the implementation. For certain tasks I use Claude, which tends to be more expensive but sometimes saves me time.<p>Using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Cursor is cheaper than having two separate subscriptions, and their free tier of Composer is good enough. I will now have to reconsider my options.
JetBrains is a good option - works with any model/agent. Also they have very good semantic search for the codebase, which is exposed via MCP to the agents.
It's very easy to achieve that and more with: Crush (or Opencode) + OpenRouter right from the terminal. Takes a minute to setup.
currenly I use pi with openrouter and is very nice I combine with a chatgpt sub that allows me to use it with pi. and when my usage runs out I turn to openrouter. Then same when I need anthropic models
AmpCode is not popular here but I recommend it, give it I try and you will not go back, except the price may a bit expensive.
In Antigravity you can install Codex and use both. Not sure if the Claude extension can work too but probably.
you can still bring your own OpenAI key into Cursor. that is not going to change.
I like Cursor. Honestly the biggest reason is the decent WYSIWYG markdown editor.
What a shame for Cursor. I found it a great tool - I actually liked Composer 2.5; but now being bought by SpaceX has for a while left a bad taste - and they keep pushing Grok and now GrokBot.<p>I took the 50% discount instead of cancelling - but with this I'll likely not renew.<p>So sad to watch them go from great to mediocre in such a short time.
While this isn't great for users it seems like a pretty standard circling of the wagons in preparation for the next phase in the battle for frontier AI dominance.<p>Ironically, as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic. I don't feel good about giving OpenAI money directly, but I've found switching to GPT 5.6 Sol now and again in Cursor to be useful. Now I'll probably just forget about OpenAI models.
I think they are betting that Astra will be impossible to ignore.
I'd need to have a problem I couldn't solve with current models for my eyes to wander.
What if it’s cheaper too?
Yeah I haven’t had a problem yet which was too difficult for Fable to solve. I do have problems which Sol does not do well on. But if I could get Fable-level intelligence faster/cheaper and less restricted, that’s all I need.
Yeah not sure why everyone thinks they need a PhD lvl assitant to build their slop SaaS when an open source model that is 100x cheaper, and 3x faster and arguably still "PhD" level assitant could also build their slop SaaS.
For three months, until the next SOTA model drops. And with each improved model, the number of people who actually need it declines.
It’s OpenAI (and Anthropic I’m sure) realising that they’ve somehow ended up stuck in the lowest margin part of the stack (providing inference), and trying to get out of it
Why would you possibly allow companies to push you? You are the customer and you should control which models you use.
I don't see how it makes sense to use models outside of Grok or Composer in cursor unless you like the tooling to such degree that you're willing to pay out the nose for access to OpenAI and Anthropic to use with that tooling. And Codex is regularly scoring towards the top among harnesses, so you might as well use the best harness available for the given model. I'm happy with Grok and Composer in Cursor. If Cursor wants to add more models, they should host more open models.
The reason it makes sense is because different models are better at different things. Allowing yourself to be locked in to a particular model by these companies is a bad idea and will lead to worse outcomes for yourself and the market as a whole.
Because I pay $60 per month and not using the included API tokens on other models is wasteful.
Is there a good place for harness comparison/scoring?
<a href="https://www.harness-bench.ai/leaderboard.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.harness-bench.ai/leaderboard.html</a><p>This provides a method, but the data looks stale and perhaps a bit thin compared to say, Cursor, or even AntiGravity data.
Cursor founder just tweeted that he was sad to see this ban and that OpenAI model represented around 5% of total usage.<p>Burn.
5% of traffic. OpenAI models are a much higher percentage of revenue.
Not really a surprise given their own models are the default option? Most people wouldn't change model. And if you want to use Claude or GPT you don't really have a reason to use Cursor over Claude Code or Codex
That's probably a lot more than their market share versus Claude Code and Codex.
Codex has 20+ million users. They are doing much better than Cursor.
Source?
If you have such a world changing technology, why sell an API when you can capture all the value yourself? That's what every provider is asking themselves.<p>Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.
Being a pure play model provider is completely untenable right now. Coding agents own your demand; Nvidia, data centers, and DRAM manufacturers own your supply. You're getting squeezed by open weight models. Your only bet to making money off this thing is by locking your model down to your program to have some semblance of a moat. The fact that businesses can change providers with just the change of an API key is unsustainable. You have neither the "hard to switch" lock-in of a traditional software company nor do you have the near-zero marginal cost of production they have. Each token of inference costs you money, not to mention the training costs. At least locking the models down to your harness lets you get some sort of lock-in.
> we are giving the maximum notice provided by our contract.<p>Anyone else surprised that the maximum notice period allowed is about 3 months?<p>I would have thought 3 months is minimum notice period, with provisions to stop faster if any provable violation occurs.
From the article, it seems they using a clause allowing them to terminate the contract after transfer of ownership.<p>This clause probably has a expiry date and they are saying “we are trying not to be jerks here by waiting until the last second to trigger it”.
It makes no sense that a contract would even provide a maximum notice period. Why would parties put that in? What benefit would either derive from restricting themselves to not getting earlier notice.
Everyone is playing hardball. No one wants to be IBM in an IBM-Microsoft dance.<p>But this is kind of like banning GPU exports to China. It will encourage them to develop their own technology. Yes, it will take them longer, but in the long-run China will be more successful with their own GPU tech.<p>The same could be true of SpaceX/xAI
Bummed, but I guess for me, doesn't mean cursor subscription ending though. Grok is a pretty amazing model for the speed and price on Cursor.
> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms.<p>I think Sam Altman has played a clever business move here, they can use this excuse immediately after the Hugging Face leaks and it's not going to be dismissed willy-nilly. Whereas long term they probably wanted to end their partnership with Cursor anyway. I bet Dario will be happy about this too, but maybe the compute deal prevents him from doing similar anytime soon.<p>Very interesting times we live in...
Is it really an excuse? As the release points out, musk admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI’s models to produce xai models on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think about goose for the gander wrt IP theft, I wouldn’t voluntarily do business with a competitor who was actively and brazenly flouting my terms, would you?
This is the platform risk of building on rented intelligence. Cursor’s moat now has to be its harness and true model portability—not privileged access to any one AI lab.
> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms.<p>This move seems to protect Astra against distillation. I wonder whether Astra will be released before or after 11/12.
You can still use it via API keys (answering my own question from earlier), <a href="https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343774?s=46" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343774?s=46</a>
This seems like a no brainer, not sure how Cursor would expect to be trusted by any other company now that they’re owned by SpaceX.
My guess is that OpenAI now has a full blown Cursor equivalent in development (an expansion of Codex?) and will announce it in September. Otherwise it stands to lose those who are used to working with Cursor.
Yeah, the "go above and beyond for our users" implies they have a "better" version of Cursor coming. Probably integrating their new chip/microphone based product.
codex is already great.. cursor is just a competing harness<p>codex growth at 20mill now, prob more cost effective to allocate that compute to people directly paying now
OpenAI acquired Ona in June <a href="https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/</a>
Kinda crazy how fast things can change after an acquisition<p>If your coding tool depends on other companies’ AI models, one business decision can suddenly change the whole product
Damn; Cursor has basically no value if Anthropic pulls the same move. Twitter Part 2 indeed.
I’d be canceling for sure Grok is a huge joke and consistently destroys my Clojure files.
Anthropic rents a lot of capacity from xAI, so I don't think they're in a position to do the same.
How so? A dozen very capable models out there. And the gap between frontier models from the two main US labs kept narrowing, at this point non existent.<p>The quality/price ratio is clearly superior when running Qwen, GLM, or Deepseek.<p>To make a product more exclusive won't hide the fact that product is becoming more and more irrelevant.
Most people do not enjoy the output of the open models or know where their code is being sent so I’m out. Also I don’t trust Elon anyway, I’m just going to make a VS Code Extension that handles things how I want but I’d like to offer the same deals Cursor got for tokens with OpenAI and Anthropic, for me this was the key 1/4 token cost!
Honestly, can't say I miss my Cursor subscription at all, and I'm surprised they're still a going concern. Why would I want to use a proprietary VSCode fork with an identity crisis when I can use literally any editor with any agent and have about the same experience?
We have a subscription at work. They have a CLI agent that works pretty well. Lately I mostly use it with grok, which is actually quite a capable model.
The integrated review UI is super helpful, but apparently nobody reviews code anymore except me.
Allowing the company or harness to dictate which models you use is crazy.
> We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.<p>Do I smell a cursor-analogue from openAI?
It was honestly just a matter of time, given all of the bad blood there is between Sam and Elon and Elon basically admitting under oath they were distilling other companies models.<p>I wonder if Anthropic will follow suit given their campaign against distillation or if they'll stay quiet given their reliance on SpaceX (among others) for hardware.
This low key confirms Astra for November
Any tool that tightly couples you to an inference provider is a sub-par tool and destined to be forgotten.
Does this also apply to API endpoints, let’s say if you want to provide API keys in Cursor to Azure or Bedrock deployment of a GPT model?
Why maximum notice? Why not minimum notice? Elon doesn't deserve more than that.
Why would they give the maximum time instead of the minimum given violation has already occurred?
Auto and Grok is pretty good. As a casual user OpenAI models are expensive for the marginal (or none if at all) step up in performance.
Not surprised, but honestly I don't feel like this is a huge loss for cursor. Models are so commoditized, and 99% of users don't need particularly fancy models. Between existing anthropic models, composer-2, honestly even grok models, and also the fact that many people just use 'auto' mode, I feel like many won't feel the impact for OpenAI's withdrawal.<p>Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For better or worse though, Xai seems like its lining themselves up to handle being on their own for cursor.
When I was bringing up IDEs at work and advocating JetBrains (I’ve since built my own … ) a colleague questioned why we don’t just use cursor instead of waiting for JetBrains Air to come out.<p>The products are basically equivalent but JetBrains is a profitable bootstrapped company that has been building IDEs for 20 years and Cursor is a flash in the pan startup with a squillion dollar valuation to support. Sooner or later they’re going to do something that will fuck their users over.<p>And selling to SpaceX was it!
They were going to do this regardless of SpaceX.
Wow, I don’t use cursor but that seems pretty bad for them.<p>Is there a way to work around this (like using your OpenAI limits directly?)
I used cursor extensively both at work and for personal use. Its harness is pretty darn good but I basically never used OpenAI models in it.<p>The first party cursor models (initially composer and now grok-cursor) and price very competitively for their quality and have very generous usage limits included in the base plans, and then per token pricing afterwards.<p>Occasionally I’ve used some of the Anthropic models in it but found their cost massively outweighed the benefits for the type of usage we do.<p>I was using Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6 for a while but the newer models are a lot more expensive at the per-token pricing.
Cursor does currently allow users to BYO OpenAI token. Given Cursor won't have access to OpenAI models for prompt engineering/evals though, there's definitely a question of whether they'd allow picking any new OpenAI models, assuming the BYOK option continues to exist at all.
It's basically not going to affect them at all. I don't know a single person that uses OpenAI models via Cursor. Saw another comment say it was 5%.
I used mostly OpenAI for the last like 6 months in cursor. I got tired of how slow Claude models are and switched. I’m surprised usage is so low. Wonder why.
All it shows is that openai is likely still subsidizing inference, sees no value in integration buried within other branded tooling competing with theirs.
It's going to be tough for Origin, their code hosting platform, to follow in the footsteps of GitHub, if they can't be treated as a neutral party.
Spend a lot of time thinking about why individuals shouldn't trust large AI cos, now it's interesting getting to think about how the AI companies themselves don't trust each other. Capitalism is viciously cold and uncaring.
Models are now having much tighter integration with harness.<p>It's gunna to happen anyway.<p>We are sailing into the age of vertically integrated intelligence.
I mean, given Sam and Elon’s relationship, I don’t think anyone is surprised.
At my dayjob we are big users of Cursor's Cloud Agents. We use them to trigger automated investigations customer support issues, alarms, feature requests etc. The Cursor editor is fairly meh in comparison, but this has become a big part of our workflow. And having anyone on our team manage them. What competing products are there we should try?
Devin Automations is the most obvious one: solid UX, but can get very expensive to run.<p>There are also a bunch of newer startups in this space. I'm building one myself, <a href="https://boxes.dev" rel="nofollow">https://boxes.dev</a> -- we're very early but building for this exact use case. Some other ones worth a look are Factory Droid and Amp Orbs. Those two build their own agent harness (like Cursor), whereas with boxes.dev we run the native codex and claude code harnesses directly.
Elon Musk openly admitted to distilling OpenAI's models [1], which I think explains the "based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts".<p>Last year, Anthropic cut off Windsurf the same way [2]. Fortunately, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI allows you to use your subscription with other harnesses, including Cursor.<p>Of course today, Anthropic is taking the "high road" and is OK with with SpaceX [3] including their models in Cursor, because they need SpaceX's compute.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elon-musk-admits-xai-distilled-openai-data-to-train-models-heres-what-that-means/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is-limiting-its-direct-access-to-claude-ai-models/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657</a>
More generally, Musk admittedly works with a "move fast and break things" mentality. His companies have repeatedly broken environmental laws, labor laws, and securities laws. His companies often fail to deliver the features they promise and routinely miss deadlines they've committed to. They routinely violate contracts that they have agreed to.<p>Not doing business with them is a completely normal and unremarkable decision.
> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts.<p>> After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke (opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others).<p>I have never seen one large company throw another large company under the bus without any legalese filters like this before. Wondering if OpenAI site got pwned. Or maybe we in some strange, alternative reality. I doubt even their LLMs would be this frank.
And to announce it on a Friday night. Brutal.
Sam and Elon have a long standing feud. This is more than just bad blood between companies.
Elon Musk openly admitted to distilling OpenAI's models during his lawsuit against OpenAI. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elon-musk-admits-xai-distilled-openai-data-to-train-models-heres-what-that-means/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo...</a>
they’ll see an uptick in codex user count trying the new models and can build a narrative around that too
So Astra release Friday 13th November!?
The way I read the article was that they will continue providing their current models, but won't let them use any newer ones announced even between now and the end date. But I might be wrong.<p>> we’ve decided to hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor.
damn... cursor doesn't get as much love as claude code or codex (on here anyways), but honestly, it's gotten amazing in the last 6 months.<p>i loved switching between sol / fable / grok 4.5.<p>... and something tells me fable might not be available on cursor for much longer :/
This is personal, not business.
I guess I’m on the right track.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835</a><p>If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.
I've been using Cursor with Grok 4.6 a lot over the last week or so. Grok Build as well. Both options are performing very well for me.
Grok? Google?<p>I'm not a fan of Elon, nor do I use Cursor, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't the only models.
All good points. However, it's not a safe assumption that everyone operates that way. People probably use the flagship models because that's what they know. Sure, some probably just use the default, in this case Grok.<p>Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok.<p>Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.
Cursor is like one of the least economical ways to use Claude and OpenAI, virtually nobody does it. You use Cursor for their autocomplete/composer + grok. For using Claude and Codex, you get immeasurably more bang for your buck just using them directly.
What happened to researchers embracing the open research culture of improving on the results of others?
Makes sense.
Days until cursor announces open models… 3, 2, 1…<p>Seriously though, when the api providers start
blacklisting cursor and they’re forced to swap to open weight models…<p>If that happens, what even is the difference between openrouter and cursor?
You assume OpenAI doesn’t turn off access to OpenRouter too.<p>Strategically, OpenAI long-term will want to own the direct relationship with all their customers. As will most major AI labs.
They already have open models.<p><a href="https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing" rel="nofollow">https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing</a>
Well, one has a pretty popular harness.
<p><pre><code> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts.
</code></pre>
The pot calling the kettle black. Look who's talking. A company that trained it's models illegally on so many copyrighted materials without compensating anyone involved.<p>For a company named "Open" AI, they've been hardly open at all and the slew of resignations of top tier execs in the company is really the proof.<p>Make no mistake, this isn't a moral decision. This is just killing the competition using morality as an excuse.
Codex cli is open source rust project (Claude Code is not). Whisper is an open weight ASR/STT model. GPT-OSS is an open weight LLM that can run locally and is still very capable. CLIP is an open source model used for image encoding. Just some of the open contributions from OpenAI
Correct. It's killing the competition. Which is what you should do if you want to run a successful business.
i don't see the point of cursor when vsc + codex extension does the same thing. i don't use autocomplete anymore (who writes code anymore? lol) any and anyone using grok unironically is also probably a moron.<p>i only tell VC type people or others from whom i want something "oh yeah grok is cool" if they mention it, because they're always sucking off Elon
helloooo
pot calling kettle black
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Feels like scam altam writes the openai blog posts himself. The way Musk is brought up feels very 'mean girl'y
OpenAI / Sam Altman is probably even shadier than musk
this is a pretty clean test of whether people were buying cursor or just using it for convenient access to whichever model was flavor of the week.<p>i work in qa so i'm naturally wary of adding another critical dependency to a development workflow, if the model you actually want can just disappear because two vendor change ownership or start argueing then the wrapper has to be really good on its own.<p>cursors harness and its own models may be good enough that users stay, and if they do cursor has a moat at least. if everyone follows the openai models out the door, it will just become a polished ui.