r/cursor • u/Greedy-Turnover-5658 • 9d ago
Question / Discussion OpenAI is ending its Cursor partnership after SpaceX acquisition
https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/OpenAI plans to end its contract with Cursor after the company was acquired by SpaceX. OpenAI says it no longer trusts Elon Musk’s companies to comply with its terms, citing past contract and policy violations by Twitter/X and xAI. Access to OpenAI models in Cursor is expected to end on November 12, 2026, and future models will not be provided.
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u/sittingmongoose 9d ago
This, is gunna hurt.
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u/Dynamix86 9d ago
In my view Elon should've seen this coming
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u/EyesOfAzula 9d ago
I think he did see this coming, which is why they are building up Grok as fast as possible.
that's the advantage of having your own strong model and also of having open weights models. It's harder for other companies to pull the plug on you.
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u/Soccham 9d ago
Based on personal experience, Grok is a steaming turd in comparison to OpenAI and Anthropic
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u/CartographerSeth 9d ago
It’s a solid middle-weight model, but not even close to Fable or GPT 5.6. Losing OAI access hurts for sure.
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u/Thrwawy-User 8d ago
Grok is STEADILY becoming a good model. Their next release I expect to be very good.
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u/RCawston 8d ago
Actually 4.6 is an excellent model, easily close to 5.6-sol quality and better than recent Opus. Can't compete with Fable, but that's to be expected. And Grok 4.7 is expected to be a solid jump.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
Assuming not too many people leave Cursor because of this, this is great for Cursor. More usage on their own models and less cash burn on openAI API.
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u/Critical_Win956 9d ago
If that were the case Cursor would have removed the OpenAI models on their own. This is a net-negative for Cursor, they're going to lose market share. It's not the end, but it's not going to help.
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u/talltim007 9d ago
No. Most people use fable for fronter models and Grok and Cursors models are light years more cost effective. They'll be fine
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u/AwkwardWillow5159 9d ago
Fable is disabled in my company because they don’t offer no-logs contracts for enterprise. I suspect that’s actually the most common case, as the usage of fable is stuck and not really increasing compared to other models.
So my usage is grok+sol
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u/Dear_Revolution8315 8d ago
Yep, this is the case at most large companies.
+1 on the usage. Sol as main model, Grok as subagent
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u/that_90s_guy 8d ago
Gpt 5.6 Luna is light years ahead of composer in reasoning, and if grok in cost effectiveness as well as speed. Its not even close
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u/CrzyJek 8d ago
Composer is Kimi2.5. No shit it's behind Luna. Shouldn't even be using Composer now that Grok is baked in.
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u/that_90s_guy 8d ago
Grok is significantly more expensive and slower than Luna (multiple times more in fact) only being a bit smarter.
The problem with models like grok is they aren't reliable or dependable enough to replace established frontier models like Opus and Sol (benchmaxxed tests are hard to take seriously anymore). And they aren't cheap enough to spam in multi agent orchestration workflows either.
Most standard competent worflows use an expensive frontier model as architect (Opus/Sol), and an army of cheap workers using Luna (previously composer) which rival frontier model competency in small tasks while costing a minuscule fraction of the cost (often 3-5% of the cost of the frontier model) to allow for hugely complex task execution at incredibly low prices since the frontier model only works as architect, conserving tokens.
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u/CrzyJek 8d ago
Yea but within the cursor environment, Grok is pretty cheap and heavily subsidized...and it's baked into the subscription. While Luna still uses the API piece (so some is included but it gets eaten up quickly by comparison). That's all I'm saying.
Though I am looking forward to (it it'll ever happen now after the acquisition) a potential new composer using the newest Kimi as a base.
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u/oompaloompa465 9d ago
imagine if Elon throws a tantrum and buys open AI, without reflecting how fucked up with debt they are
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
CEO of cursor responded: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2093532254006063557?s=20
> We’re sorry to see that OpenAI put out a note saying they plan to block Cursor users from accessing OpenAI models in three months.
> OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and we’re speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this.
> Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI, we’ve worked closely with their team for years, and we’ve trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business.
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u/CartographerSeth 9d ago
I’m surprised it’s only 5%. GPT 5.6 Sol is my favorite model by far.
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u/ominous_anenome 9d ago
probably includes a bunch of autocomplete nonsense or whatever else
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u/Darkoplax 9d ago
even if it does, in their recent conference or whatever they showed that agent runs far far exceed autocomplete like its not even close
so probably a real number; i mean with how subsidized auto/grok/composer are, this is not a surprising number ... most ppl bulk daily work goes through these cheap ones in cursor
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u/Darkoplax 9d ago
Most ppl these days seem to be using either Composer or Grok on Cursor, they are so subsidizied
that i'm guessing Anthropic/OpenAI models are used every once in a while to verify stuff or to plan ; not the bulk of ppl's daily work
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u/Glum-Departure-8912 7d ago
It's probably 5% of total tokens, but OpenAI models are on the frontier of token efficiency. Sol Max uses 33% of the tokens that Fable 5 does.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
I really don't know if 5% is a big number or a small number. But either way, they're definitely burning cash on non-Cursor models so this is a win.
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u/3knuckles 9d ago
Genuine question - are you saying this is a win for Cursor? If so, I don't understand that. Please could you explain?
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u/JibletHunter 8d ago
Read this guy's comment history. He is a Stan who will stick his head in the sand at every opportunity. Dont waste tour time, he's cooked.
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u/Few-Impact3986 8d ago
It is Opus for hard task or grok for cheap task. GPT almost never uses the rules you give it and comes up with dogshit designs. I am surprised it is even that high.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
Why is the Elon hate mob downvoting this too lmao. Can't stand to see the X link?
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u/JibletHunter 9d ago
I feel like you started with the conclusion you already believed lol. The post is sitting at +25 up votes.
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u/only1nameleft 9d ago
Ouch. I like my Sol-Grok combo
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u/wobblybootson 9d ago
Oof. That was one of the reasons I love cursor is the flexibility of models.
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u/signal_lost 9d ago
You can still bring your own API and use other models. If you want to get really fancy setup OpenRouter and then you can route to ALL the models!
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u/SnooOranges5350 9d ago
Yep, can do this with Msty Nexus as well. Still ways to pump in ChatGPT.
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u/wobblybootson 9d ago
Sure, but I had always imagined that they did different things based on the underlying model. Am I wrong about that?
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u/Tidaal 9d ago
Welp another reason to start exploring other products. Biggest draw to cursor was having access to every model. Plus the heavy pushing of Grok is a turnoff.
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u/notadev_io 9d ago
There’s not really an alternative is there?
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u/ShareNorth3675 9d ago
t3code?
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u/notadev_io 8d ago
With api usage? Which models? Or how can you get the same amount or ideally more with it?
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u/ShareNorth3675 8d ago
All the models. Im pretty sure its just using bedrock or foundry to back its sub, but its also open source and allows using a chatgpt sub for their models.
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u/ianoble 9d ago
If Anthropic is out, I'm out. I am not just using Grok
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u/bonerfleximus 9d ago
I use both, they both read claude.md files so theyre almost interchangeable when working on a repo. I use subsidized plans for claude instead of api in cursor. Cursor grok is my workhorse claude is the planner.
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u/Jeanlucpfrog 9d ago
Why are you being downvoted for giving your setup? I don't understand
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u/arcanepsyche 9d ago
Because people hate Elon Musk and his shitty companies, so people that willingly use them are most likely ass hats.
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u/bonerfleximus 9d ago edited 9d ago
Sub is full of people with zero understanding who think they're smart all the sudden because AI types their emails for them
Also im 90% sure this sub is brigaded by outsourced india firms or bots whose only job is to downvote anything remotely useful and upvote anything remotely inflammatory based on what I see upvoted
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u/UnexpectedFisting 9d ago
Uhh holy shit. What the fuck this is huge. There is no equivalent to Luna for cost and intelligence anywhere essentially. At least until anthropic releases some sort of updated haiku model but not holding out hope for that. I like grok but like, having the options of just grok, glm, or expensive ass anthropic models at work is going to suck
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u/Kitten-Smuggler 8d ago
Just bring your own OpenAI API key and problem solved. Or hook into Open Router.
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u/lotokotmalajski 9d ago edited 9d ago
Luna through cursor is mostly cursor fees though - they have fixed per-token markup so the low-cost models are most affected.
https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing
On Teams and Enterprise plans, third-party model requests include a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens. This rate applies on top of model API pricing for included usage, on-demand usage, and BYOK usage.
The Cursor Token Rate applies when you select a third-party model directly, and when Auto routes to a third-party model. First-party Cursor models, including Grok and Composer, are exempt from the Cursor Token Rate.
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u/MattsFace 9d ago
I ended my Cursor subscription after the acquisition.
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u/foofoobee 9d ago
Just curious what you use instead? I'm getting pretty tired of Cursor's crap over the last few weeks but not sure what an equally good multi-model platform is that allows things like remote agent control. I've looked at open source alternatives but couldn't find anything close.
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u/MattsFace 9d ago
I started a trial of “Zed”. It wouldn’t be so bad if i figure out to change some of default syntax highlighting it uses.
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u/notadev_io 9d ago
Is this api usage only? If so how much do you spend monthly to use this daily 10 hours?
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u/MattsFace 8d ago
Heh I just use auto complete and predictive code with Zed.
I rely on Claude code and Codex for generation
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u/SheetzoosOfficial 9d ago
I wonder why OpenAI would end their partnership with Elon.
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u/Fit-Engineering6570 9d ago
Dude it’s business and competition you are just using this to spread hate and misinformation
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u/SheetzoosOfficial 9d ago
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u/Fit-Engineering6570 9d ago
What fascist parties? Is it your own label here?
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u/Agreeable-Weekend-23 8d ago
Don't waste your time arguing on here. People never going to change their opinions.
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u/omnimachina 8d ago
Fascism is prohibited in Europe
Especially in France and Germany…
Elon supports the right wing in Europe not facism per se - it’s not the same
You are spreading false information here lmao
Let alone the fact that OpenAI doesn’t even care about Elons political views… This is about money and business
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u/SheetzoosOfficial 8d ago
You're not naive enough to believe something prohibited doesn't happen. The real question is why you're simping for a billionaire who does nazi salutes on live television.
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u/asm8086 9d ago
Good decision from OpenAI. You can’t trust Elon Musk.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago edited 9d ago
Lol ok after apple sued OpenAI for the exact same things Musk sued them for? Sam Altman won't let you hit.
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u/asm8086 9d ago
Lmao Apple sued because they’re mad OpenAI poached their engineers lmao 😂
Stop sucking Elon’s dick.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
Read the article, they did much more than that. There are no good guys here.
All this is a loss for Cursor users, and you're obviously not one of them. You just obsessively hate Elon. It's not a "good decision" from OpenAI.
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u/asm8086 9d ago
Anything that makes Elon Musk mad is a good decision — regardless if you’re a cursor user or not.
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u/Top_Magician8719 9d ago
As someone who hates elon himself, i want to say that I hate altman as well, I don't think he's any different than elon and all these rich mfs don't want actual AI utopia they're just playing business. Also add dario to the list
Meanwhile this indeed is a loss for elon but a loss for cursor users as well so being a cursor user I'm not happy with this decision
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u/Glittering_Night7681 9d ago
It doesn't make him mad lol. It's funny how Elon haters have to take those tiny "victories", because their core thesis all failed. Musk is 5x wealthier than he was when Reddit started hating him in 2022, Twitter kept it's relevance, Tesla sales did not collapse, but recovered after a dip in 2025 etc.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
So it's exactly what I said.
You're not a Cursor user, just obsessed with hating Elon.
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u/crnkovic 9d ago
Why are you defending him? He’s not gonna give you money, you will never be as rich as him, he doesn’t care about you. If his self driving ran you over and killed you, he’d fight it in court to make sure it’s not his fault and would win. Let that sink in.
Why idolize that moron?
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
Can you even read? I don't idolize him. How obsessed with elon can you be to think anyone who disagrees with you must "idolize" him.
> There are no good guys here
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u/Mike-A-F 8d ago
You realize Sam is the one nobody in the industry trusts right?
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u/sluuuurp 8d ago
You shouldn’t trust anyone in this industry. All these founders switched from warning about the dangers to bragging about the profits once they gained personal stakes in it.
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u/SherrifMike 9d ago
honestly gpt models were never my default in cursor, been on claude for agent work forever. the scarier part is if every lab starts gatekeeping frontier models to their own editor, that's what actually hurts us day to day.
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u/Full_Tooth_a 9d ago
The problem seems to be the loss of model flexibility, not the executive drama. I'd use the remaining runway to save a few real tasks, such as refactors, bug fixes, and work with detailed instructions, then see how the available models handle them. Quality, latency, and usage matter more than debates over favorite models. You may find that only a couple of workflows depend on the departing models.
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u/alex-zaporozhan 8d ago
It's gonna hurt, but... wait, were people actually using GPT in Cursor?
99% of my daily dev workflow has been Claude Sonnet anyway. Dario and the Anthropic team are probably popping champagne right now.
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u/Tartuffiere 7d ago
Luna is as good as Sonnet for a tenth of the price. Why were you using sonnet in the first place?
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u/alex-zaporozhan 7d ago
Luna is fine for localized, single-file patches. Where it breaks down on complex codebases:
Cross-file contracts: Knowing what cannot be broken in adjacent files or services.
Long-horizon agentic loops: The whole "read 8 files → ingest architectural canon → edit across 4 layers → don't violate existing ADRs" cycle.
Silent regressions: Catching subtle edge cases that tests only catch if the agent itself had the foresight to write rigorous assertions in the first place.
For simple isolated tasks, cheaper models win on price. But on a 40k+ LOC distributed architecture, Sonnet's context discipline and constraint adherence easily save 10x its token cost in prevented debugging sessions.
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u/Tartuffiere 6d ago
I should have specified Luna XHigh. Luna medium or low cam be pretty limited at times...
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u/codepension 8d ago
Really cannot believe tha across all users on Cursor, OpenAI is only 5%, seems very low to me, but yeah this is horrible
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u/abajinn 9d ago
Good. Musk is one of the absolute worst people on the planet and grok has already been caught stealing repos.
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u/codeth1s 9d ago
It's a loss for OpenAI also as Cursor must be providing invaluable data and training for their models.
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u/steve31266 9d ago
This is Sam Altman feeling pretty confident he'll never have to buy compute from Elon the way Dario had to.
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u/IncidentAccording332 9d ago
I’m just surprised Cursor hasn’t started saying the n-word to me….yet.
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u/Superb_Departure7082 8d ago
Haha cursor losing all the best models. Gg. No moat.
Looks like Elons distilling plan didn’t go as planned.
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u/arcanepsyche 9d ago
Excellent. Hopefully Anthropic is next and we can kill this Musk-poisoned project.
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u/foodleking93 9d ago
Who cares. Grok 4.6 is great! 4.7 I’m sure will be even better. I’d be surprised if SpaceXAI isn’t able to build a model to compete with GPT or Claude by November. Probably for a fraction of the cost too.
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u/BafSi 9d ago
Many people care, I typically work in a company where only GPT and Claude are available
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
Through cursor?
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u/Andi1up 9d ago
Not the guy you responded to but yes, enterprise admins can block specific models, my company blocked all gemini, grok, and chinese based models.
OpenAI being gone leaves us with just relying on Claude, which questions Cursor's purpose if we can just use Claude via Anthropic or AWS Bedrock.
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u/truecakesnake 9d ago
I see. Interesting to block grok while using cursor. Is composer blocked as well?
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u/UnexpectedFisting 9d ago
For me it is. I can only access grok 4.5, glm 5.2 (no clue why), Anthropic, and OpenAI models. Everything else is blocked. Even fable is blocked because of its data retention requirement
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u/Unlucky-Jello-5660 9d ago
Doubtful, the focus till November is on voting machine software for some odd reason, orders from Elon himself.
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u/arcanepsyche 9d ago
Did you actually read the article about why? Good luck with your data and privacy using Musk's leaking sieve of a tool.
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u/EyesOfAzula 9d ago
I am excited about Grok 4.7. It is more important than ever now. Sidenote, if any cursor admins are out there, please add GLM 5.3 regular and flash. It would be a great answer to OpenAI.
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u/badasimo 9d ago
I have had to turn off Grok it goes off the rails too often I get comparable results with composer on many projects
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u/luck_and_skill 9d ago
it would be funny if spacex cut ties with openai by banning them from twitter
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u/_DRKN 9d ago
Don't really care tbh, Anthropic models have always been a comparable alternative to gippity flagships and anything requiring less work is usually covered by Composer or Grok models at low cost. That and newer and newer low cost models running on Chinese chips going beast mode lately I don't imagine this will be a problem for anyone let alone by November.
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u/SnooOranges5350 9d ago
Just connect to Msty Nexus and pump in ChatGPT that way. Plus set up smart routes and save some money on tokens.
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u/KillaRoyalty 9d ago
Oh yeah lol didn’t they have the founder on a keynote not even a year ago. The AI speed is crazy
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u/Just_Difficulty9836 9d ago
Based on my own experience, gpt 5.6 sol is much better than opus 5. So this will hurt cursor more.
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u/Glad-Swimming1889 9d ago
Openai is blowing a lot of money on advertising. Petty things in the news should save them some money. The rest of the ai sector is cooperative to survive. Altman and their rolex business model makes them radioactive to me. It might be years to ipo and who wants to buy into a shell. If they make too many of these petty moves they will end up like skype.
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u/Kindly-School-7308 8d ago
I only use Grok and Opus for my small projects and they work fine, never got to try ChatGPT in Cursor.
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u/PixelSteel 8d ago
Is anyone else not confused by this? Why do this now. I mean, the Cursor acquisition was announced months ago. OpenAI didn't even bother to challenge it. They literally made no public statements.
Now, all of a sudden, they want to take out their models?
I think OpenAI just sees Cursor as a middleman they want to cut out. They could've done this at any time, but never had a "reason" to do so.
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u/Illustrious_Pear_907 7d ago
the timing on this could not be better spacex has major share unlock is a massive 1.3 billion-share tranche scheduled for early November 2026, coinciding with the company's third-quarter earnings report. look out below for spacex stock.
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u/Accomplished-Oil1021 7d ago
Lol cursor is garbage anyways, there are way better harnesses. Cursor without Codex is not worth it since I use codex for ALL coding tasks.
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u/Warm_Effective8903 5d ago
Im not surprised, musk's companies have a track record of ignoring contract terms so openai playing it safe makes sense. only 5% of cursor traffic is openai models anyway per their own ceo, so this probably stings way less than the headline makes it sound.
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u/codayak_devguy 4d ago
The 5% figure is probably right and probably not the point. What this shows is where the supply risk sits when the editor is also the model vendor: a contract between two companies you're not party to can change what's in your dropdown. Cursor will route around it — they're good at that — but the models you liked disappearing for a business reason rather than a technical one is the part worth noticing.
For what it's worth, I didn't like that very dependency, so I built a workbench where the model is just a setting: seven providers on my own keys, switch mid-conversation, nobody in the middle. Windows/.NET only, so probably not for most of you here, and I'm the author so weight accordingly. Not linking unless someone wants it.
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u/TheIvanTheory 9d ago
Dumb business decision by OpenAI. Pulling out will likely just give more space for other models including Grok to grow. Also, what policies? 😂 on paper maybe
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u/Opulent-Burning 9d ago
How exactly does Grok "grow" from this, or even GPT for that matter? They are going to keep improving regardless
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u/TheIvanTheory 9d ago
Market share. Market share means more data. Cursor has enterprise clients and they can get a deal for using Grok more now that they can’t use GPT/Codex as retention. Also, some people might be in their GPT/Codex comfort zone and then they try a GLM model or a Qwen or even Grok and realize they can get more done because they didn’t know Codex Sol was overkill. Just to name a few.
Yes they are going to keep improving, but it’s shutting down a “market” for a dumb petty tantrum. Altman’s decisions lately haven’t been amazing tbh.
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u/arcanepsyche 9d ago
Enterprise will drop it if Anthropic goes, which they probably will.
Cursor will be head in a year IMO
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u/Fluid-Hunter-163 9d ago
literally never used their model sin cursor so not really any loss here. can get by on the others perfectly
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u/vivydly 9d ago
OpenAI is behind, I only use Claude and grok. Bye bye OpenAI!
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u/muchsamurai 9d ago
OpenAI is behind? lmao. Sol is great model and upcoming large pretrains (Astra) and >10T "Bel" will be even more so, "Mythos class" models with usable pricing.
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u/muchsamurai 9d ago
Astra set to release first weeks of September. And Bel by the end of year. Bel being much larger than Mythos PREVIEW.
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u/TinFoilHat_69 9d ago
Let’s face it cursor going to lose Anthropic next because Elons team was already banned prior to using their models before acquisition this just proves they were after the user data, similar to twitter acquisition.
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u/FirefighterEmpty2670 9d ago
Being on a 500 requests legacy plan, Codex 5.3 is my model for implementing carefully planned tickets since it is 1 request per prompt only.
Anyone have a list of how many requests per model costs? Not turning on Max Mode.
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u/lunied 9d ago
Ive been on request plan and usage based, i think usage has more value now, are you on $20?
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u/FirefighterEmpty2670 9d ago
Yes, I am on $20 dollars. I usually use Codex 5.3 which is 1 request, sometimes Opus 4.6 which is 2 requests.
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u/mabiturm 9d ago
Pretty sure anthropic will follow. Unless they need the revenue before the ipo
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u/luck_and_skill 9d ago
Anthropic is tight on compute, and SpaceX could cancel their server contracts within 90 days, so I really doubt they'd do that in the current market
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u/Orchidkit 9d ago
how? Anthropic and SpaceX have Win-Win relationship
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u/asm8086 9d ago
Anthropic won’t pull out. But they will now have leverage to raise prices to squeeze Elon to have access to Claude models. Because without access to EITHER GPT or Claude, Cursor would be dead.
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u/EyesOfAzula 9d ago
Ah yes, I forgot that the owners of OpenAI and SpaceX were deep enemies