SpaceX Is Buying Cursor, and Now the AI World Wonders If Rivals Will Yank Their Models Elon Musk's SpaceX is set to acquire the coding startup Cursor, and the biggest question hanging over the deal is whether OpenAI and Anthropic will keep letting their models power a product now owned by a competitor. The moment SpaceX moved to buy Cursor, the entire AI industry locked onto a single question. Once this popular coding startup becomes part of Elon Musk's company, will competing labs like OpenAI and Anthropic keep letting their models run inside it, or will they slam the door shut? The question matters because third-party AI models have always been the backbone of Cursor's business. The company has begun training its own models over the past few years, but it has always let users pick from a range of offerings by Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs to power its coding assistant. That approach let Cursor serve customers whichever model happened to be the best, or the cheapest, at any given moment. It paid off for Anthropic and OpenAI too, since both count Cursor among their largest customers and give the startup a prominent place in their marketing materials. According to people close to Cursor, the company hopes that even after the SpaceX acquisition is finalized later this year, it can keep running its AI coding product as a platform, serving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs alongside its own. How that actually plays out is far from certain, and whether or not Cursor stays model agnostic is one of the biggest questions now hanging over the AI industry. A relationship already under strain Eno Reyes, the cofounder and chief technology officer of Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, is not convinced that SpaceX's rivals will automatically cut Cursor off simply because it will be owned by a competing AI lab. "I don't know if the decision is as black and white," Reyes says. "It's actually super unclear to us." Cursor declined to comment. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. This is not the first time Cursor's relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been tested. Cursor once complemented these labs by distributing their models through its coding platform. But it has increasingly found itself in direct competition with them, as OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code have grown into major lines of their respective businesses. The SpaceX acquisition will likely only sharpen that rivalry. Why both sides are staying quiet SpaceX and Cursor can't say much about how they will operate after the deal, partly because it 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 set to inherit Cursor's assets, customer contracts and intellectual property, which means that if OpenAI and Anthropic want to reach Cursor's users, they will now have to do business with Musk. Once the deal is done, it's possible SpaceX will decide it doesn't want to send business toward Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its biggest rivals in the race to build frontier AI. Anthropic and OpenAI, in turn, may decide they are unwilling to sell their models through a product owned by Musk, given that both companies' CEOs, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, have clashed with him before. A prickly history, shifting alliances AI labs have not exactly played nice when it comes to selling models to one another. Last year, the moment news broke that OpenAI was acquiring the AI coding startup Windsurf, Anthropic quickly cut off its access (the deal ultimately fell through). 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 keep OpenAI and SpaceX from using its Claude models. But the winds may be shifting. Anthropic recently struck a multi-billion dollar deal to buy computing resources from SpaceX, a sign that Amodei and Musk may be willing to set aside their differences to beat their common enemy: OpenAI. That compute partnership alone could be reason enough for Anthropic to keep offering its models inside Cursor. OpenAI has skin in the game too OpenAI may have its own reasons to keep working with Cursor. The startup is a major OpenAI partner, and the lab's executives have held preliminary talks about acquiring it in the past. OpenAI's startup fund was also one of Cursor's earliest backers, taking part in the company's seed and Series A rounds. According to people close to Cursor, that startup fund is set to reap a significant return on its investment in the form of SpaceX stock as a result of the acquisition. OpenAI says on its website that the company itself is not directly an investor in OpenAI's startup fund, which was originally set up and managed by Altman. The fund draws investment from outside parties such as Microsoft, along with other OpenAI partners. A growing hunger for model independence Palantir CEO Alex Karp put his finger on a broader worry echoing across the AI industry during a viral CNBC appearance this week: businesses are tired of being locked into a handful of frontier labs and want more options. Reyes, the Factory CTO, says "model independence," the ability to avoid being tied to any single lab's technology, matters to the Fortune 500 companies he talks with because it gives them flexibility. He believes this is one of the key advantages independent AI coding startups like his hold over the major labs. Cursor, too, has long touted its own independence as a strength. The upside of partnering with a lab directly Still, there are real benefits to working with an AI lab directly and being more than just a platform. Cursor CEO Michael Truell announced at the company's Compile conference last month that the startup is already partnering with SpaceX to train its next model, which will use ten to twenty times more computing power than it could previously access. The hope is that this makes the new model comparable to, or even better than, what OpenAI and Anthropic offer. In a blog post in April, Cursor said a shortage of computing resources had been holding it back, and that it now believes it can dramatically improve its models by leaning on SpaceX's data centers. At the Compile conference, Truell added that Cursor is training its new model to be "intelligent beyond coding." Over the past year, Cursor has begun targeting customers beyond software engineers, shipping features aimed at people like graphic designers. Once the deal closes, it would be no surprise if Cursor effectively becomes SpaceX's enterprise AI arm. A price war and the road ahead There's another factor to weigh. Smaller AI coding startups are struggling to compete with the heavily subsidized coding subscriptions that OpenAI and Anthropic offer developers. Their $200 monthly subscription plans can hand coders well over $1000 worth of model usage. Now that Cursor is part of SpaceX, it may be able to offer similarly aggressive pricing of its own. Cursor's core problem has been that it lacked the capital and computing power to reach its lofty ambitions. Seen that way, Cursor is better off inside SpaceX, even if it loses its relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic. But if Cursor can play nice and compete fiercely at the same time, this could end up being one of the great acquisitions of the AI era. What this means for you • For developers using Cursor: After the deal there is uncertainty over whether outside models like Claude and GPT will remain available inside the tool, which could disrupt your workflow. • For companies and buyers: Backed by SpaceX's compute, Cursor could eventually offer aggressive, cheaper pricing like the $200 monthly plans, potentially lowering the cost of AI coding subscriptions. Questions & Answers 1. Who is buying Cursor? Elon Musk's company SpaceX is set to acquire the coding startup Cursor, with the deal expected to close later this year. 2. What is the biggest question about the deal? It is whether OpenAI and Anthropic will keep letting their models run inside Cursor after the acquisition, or pull them from a product owned by a competitor. 3. Why might Anthropic stay with Cursor? Anthropic recently struck a multi-billion dollar deal to buy computing resources from SpaceX, and that partnership could give it reason to keep offering its models in Cursor. 4. What stake does OpenAI have in Cursor? OpenAI's startup fund was an early investor in Cursor and is set to earn a significant return in the form of SpaceX stock because of the acquisition. 5. How powerful will Cursor's new model be? Cursor is training its next model with SpaceX using ten to twenty times more computing power than it could previously access. 6. What happened earlier with Windsurf? Last year, when news broke that OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf, Anthropic quickly cut off its access, though that deal ultimately fell through. https://trendkia.com/en/ai/spacex-ke-hatha-men-jane-ke-bada-kya-chalate-rahenge-openai-aura-anthropic-ke-modala-4191 TrendKia — Har trend, sabse pehle.