A late entrant in the news cycle of an eventful week: Following the closing of Cursor’s acquisition by SpaceX last week, it was time for OpenAI to do what Anthropic did to Windsurf when it was being considered for acquisition by OpenAI:OpenAI@OpenAIWe’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 care1:46 AM · Aug 29, 2026 · 2.3M Views1.12K Replies · 918 Reposts · 8.17K LikesThere are many angles to this, but the leading reason given should be taken at face value — OpenAI’s blogpost on this decision cites “our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts”. This follows on from years of public acrimony between respective company leaders (Elon was famously a key backer/funder of OpenAI at birth) and a failed lawsuit this year.To some extent this was very forseeable, but also points to the success of both companies involved; a year ago Cursor was up there on the GPT-5 launch video, and OpenAI cutting them off was a nonstarter with Claude models being so far ahead in coding. Today, GPT 5.6 is a serious coding alternative to the Claude 5 series, AND CursorSpaceXai is now promoting Grok 4.6, itself finally a successful coding model for Xai, and Grok Bot is a viable competitor to Codex/ChatGPT. Both companies worked very very hard to be in a place where they are taken seriously as competitors, and now they are.Cursor’s only response so far is diplomatic, on one hand noting that OpenAI is only 5% of Cursor traffic, and on the other not accepting that their decision seems final:Michael Truell@mntruellWe’re sorry to see that OpenAI put out a note saying they plan to block Cursor users from accessing OpenAI models in three months.
