The past week pushed three quiet shifts into the open. A coding model matched the frontier at a tenth of the cost. Custom chips started outgrowing Nvidia. And the protocol behind most AI agents got its biggest rewrite yet.
AI Coding Tools: Cursor Ships Composer 2.5 and the Price of Frontier Coding Drops
Cursor released Composer 2.5 on May 18. The headline is not the benchmark score. It is the price next to that score.
Composer 2.5 scores 79.8% on SWE-Bench Multilingual and 63.2% on CursorBench v3.1. Those numbers sit right next to Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 on the same tests. The standard tier costs $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens. That works out to roughly one-tenth the cost per task of the frontier models it matches.
The model runs on Moonshot AI's open-source Kimi K2.5 checkpoint. Cursor spent about 85% of its compute budget on its own post-training, including reinforcement learning on 25 times more synthetic coding tasks than Composer 2 used. The base model came from a Beijing lab. The behavior that developers actually feel came from Cursor's training pipeline. That split tells you something about where value lives in 2026. The base weights are increasingly a commodity. The post-training is the product.
