OpenAI said it is ending Cursor's direct access to its models on November 12, following the AI coding assistant's acquisition by SpaceX, according to OpenAI and Yahoo Finance.
"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," OpenAI said, according to Yahoo Finance. The company did not accuse Cursor itself of any violation. It pointed instead to Twitter's earlier move to cut off OpenAI's data access and to xAI's admitted use of OpenAI outputs to train its Grok model, Yahoo Finance reported.
SpaceX completed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, this month, according to Latent Space's AI News newsletter. The deal is the latest flashpoint in a yearslong conflict between OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Musk, which included a federal jury ruling against Musk in May over his lawsuit challenging OpenAI's shift to a for-profit structure, Yahoo Finance reported.
OpenAI models account for about 5% of Cursor's traffic, Cursor said in response to the announcement, according to Latent Space. Developers using Cursor can keep reaching OpenAI's models by supplying their own API keys or using OpenAI's IDE extension, or they can switch to Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini.
The cutoff is a reminder that a startup built on top of a rival's model access is one acquisition or lawsuit away from losing it. Cursor's small exposure to OpenAI's models cushions the immediate blow, but the message for founders is blunt: don't build a product on someone else's API without a plan for the day they turn it off.