OpenAI announced it would end its partnership with Cursor, a popular AI coding tool, citing distrust of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which acquired Cursor for $60 billion.
The decision comes as OpenAI seeks to diversify its revenue streams and reduce reliance on Musk’s influence.
OpenAI’s blog post stated that it could not be confident SpaceX would use its technology within its terms of service, based on its experience with Musk’s companies violating contracts.
Cursor was one of OpenAI’s top five customers in terms of revenue at the start of 2026, and the company estimated it would bring in more than $1 billion in annualized revenue by the spring of this year.
The figures highlight the financial loss OpenAI is willing to take to avoid doing business with Musk. OpenAI declined to comment on the decision, and representatives for SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Michael Truell, Cursor’s founder and CEO, who is now leading teams at SpaceX, responded publicly to OpenAI’s announcement, claiming that the ChatGPT-maker’s models only "serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic." The comment seemed designed to imply that OpenAI’s models weren’t very popular with developers using Cursor, and wouldn’t meaningfully affect its business.
OpenAI’s head of core products, Thibault Sottiaux, was quick to point out that token usage is "not a proxy for revenue nor value created," and asked Truell to "share the math" behind the 5 percent number.
OpenAI and Cursor have a long, complicated history of their own. OpenAI’s startup fund was one of the first investors in Cursor, participating in its 2023 seed round.
At the time, the idea that a young startup could compete with Microsoft’s popular AI coding tool, GitHub Copilot, seemed like a pipe dream. But in the years since, Cursor’s popularity with developers became undeniable.
WIRED previously reported that OpenAI approached Cursor about an acquisition at one point, though the talks never reached an advanced stage.
Cursor isn’t done with third-party AI models just yet. In the wake of OpenAI’s announcement, Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown said his company would continue to make Claude models available in Cursor.
I’m not sure that’s out of the goodness of their heart—Anthropic may have to play nice with Cursor because it depends on Musk’s SpaceX for $45 billion of data center capacity.
Last year, Anthropic had no problem cutting off the AI coding startup called Windsurf when OpenAI was rumored to be acquiring it. (Windsurf was ultimately bought by another startup, Cognition.) At the time, Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan told me, "It would be odd for us to sell Claude to OpenAI."
I guess it’s fine to sell Claude to SpaceX, though? The announcement follows OpenAI’s decision to go public next year, as it tries to show investors a more stable business.
OpenAI reportedly now generates more than $40 billion in annualized revenue, drawing on several different lines of business, including subscriptions, ads in ChatGPT, and selling access to its AI coding tool, Codex.
Losing a major customer like Cursor may not hurt OpenAI financially as much as it once would have, but it was certainly a difficult decision.
Source: wired
