On August 28, OpenAI announced its intention to cease direct provision of its AI models to the Cursor editor. The proposed termination date is November 12, 2026, although the final deadline has not yet been agreed upon by the parties.
We’re ending our partnership with Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX. Under our proposal, Cursor’s direct access to our models would end on November 12.
We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care…
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) August 29, 2026
The decision follows a change in ownership of Cursor: on August 14, SpaceX acquired its developer, Anysphere, for $60 billion. After the deal, the service’s management stated it would gain access to the computational resources of its new parent company to create more efficient and cost-effective models.
Distrust of SpaceX
OpenAI explained its decision by expressing concerns that SpaceX might not adhere to the licensing requirements of their technologies, citing previous experiences with Elon Musk’s businesses.
According to the ChatGPT developer, after acquiring X in October 2022, the billionaire’s company did not fulfill contractual obligations. In 2026, Musk confirmed under oath that xAI had also deviated from usage terms.
The agreement with Cursor includes a limited period for termination following a change of control. OpenAI explained that it chose the latest permissible date to give partners more time to transition.
However, under this agreement, Cursor will not receive future models from the company. The ChatGPT developer specifically mentioned the upcoming Astra, for which stricter licensing compliance controls are planned.
The partnership between the parties lasted nearly four years.
OpenAI Models Will Not Completely Disappear from Cursor
Cursor co-founder Michael Truell estimated that OpenAI models account for about 5% of the service’s user traffic. The parties continue negotiations to resolve the dispute.
The end of the partnership does not mean OpenAI will completely disappear from Cursor—users will be able to use the company’s models through their own API key, the Codex extension for IDE, or compatible third-party gateways.
Until the agreed contract termination date, OpenAI will maintain access to the models already in use, unless Cursor disables them earlier.
Following the news, Anthropic’s Director of Computational Infrastructure, Tom Brown, stated that the company will continue to support Claude in Cursor and increase the computational resources allocated for this purpose.
Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We’ll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX.
— Tom Brown (@NotTomBrown) August 29, 2026
In July, SpaceXAI introduced Grok 4.5 for programming and AI agents. The model was trained in collaboration with Cursor and made available directly in the editor.
