So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models.

This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider.

It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.

- fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg

- in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small

- in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by hand.

It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor.

Also I find that incredibly slow. By the time Claude finished a prompt I could have done a few in cursor.

And mind you, I’ve been wanting to use zed instead but the clunky vscode fork called cursor. But cursor has just a better UX for AI integration even though it’s slow and guzzle up RAM.

Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.

Using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Cursor is cheaper than having two separate subscriptions, and their free tier of Composer is good enough. I will now have to reconsider my options.

Ironically, as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic. I don't feel good about giving OpenAI money directly, but I've found switching to GPT 5.6 Sol now and again in Cursor to be useful. Now I'll probably just forget about OpenAI models.

I took the 50% discount instead of cancelling - but with this I'll likely not renew.

So sad to watch them go from great to mediocre in such a short time.

Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.

Burn.

Since the introduction of the Cursor Token Rate, my company tells us to use Claude and Codex directly with Anthropic (or Vertex AI) and OpenAI, respectively.

https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate

I'm now using Grok 4.6 most of the time. Sonnet some times. But that's it. Cursor-native models 99% of the time. I'm pretty sure Anthropic will follow OpenAI soon in pulling their models out of Cursor because it's now a true competitor.

As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms.

I think Sam Altman has played a clever business move here, they can use this excuse immediately after the Hugging Face leaks and it's not going to be dismissed willy-nilly. Whereas long term they probably wanted to end their partnership with Cursor anyway. I bet Dario will be happy about this too, but maybe the compute deal prevents him from doing similar anytime soon.

Very interesting times we live in...

we are giving the maximum notice provided by our contract.

Anyone else surprised that the maximum notice period allowed is about 3 months?

I would have thought 3 months is minimum notice period, with provisions to stop faster if any provable violation occurs.

But this is kind of like banning GPU exports to China. It will encourage them to develop their own technology. Yes, it will take them longer, but in the long-run China will be more successful with their own GPU tech.

The same could be true of SpaceX/xAI

As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms.

This move seems to protect Astra against distillation. I wonder whether Astra will be released before or after 11/12.

We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.

Do I smell a cursor-analogue from openAI?

Right now I think GPT 5.6 Luna is by far the most cost effective model, so this change is effectively kicking me off of Cursor.

I wonder if Anthropic will follow suit given their campaign against distillation or if they'll stay quiet given their reliance on SpaceX (among others) for hardware.

Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For better or worse though, Xai seems like its lining themselves up to handle being on their own for cursor.

If a company can provide the access to such a model via AWS Bedrock or similar enterprise compliant platform with a decent IDE/harness they can capture billions of dollars of market.

The closest we have to this is Claude Code but I think it can even be better and specialised. Cursor has an enormous amount of data on coding and developer usage and maybe they should use that to build a proper platform

How can you ban a competitor from using a model that you openly provide access to?

I understand that the OpenAI ToS may have been violated by X, but has anyone ruled on distillation as fair use? OpenAI believes distillation of nonAI produced content is fair use, so they don’t appear to have a leg to stand on.

https://smackernews.com/item/49428835 HN

If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.

If your coding tool depends on other companies’ AI models, one business decision can suddenly change the whole product

Is there a way to work around this (like using your OpenAI limits directly?)

It's gunna to happen anyway.

We are sailing into the age of vertically integrated intelligence.

Seriously though, when the api providers start blacklisting cursor and they’re forced to swap to open weight models…

If that happens, what even is the difference between openrouter and cursor?

We are making this choice because 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.

After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke (opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others).

I have never seen one large company throw another large company under the bus without any legalese filters like this before. Wondering if OpenAI site got pwned. Or maybe we in some strange, alternative reality. I doubt even their LLMs would be this frank.

Last year, Anthropic cut off Windsurf the same way [2]. Fortunately, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI allows you to use your subscription with other harnesses, including Cursor.

Of course today, Anthropic is taking the "high road" and is OK with with SpaceX [3] including their models in Cursor, because they need SpaceX's compute.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/windsurf-says-anthropic-is...

[3] https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657

i only tell VC type people or others from whom i want something "oh yeah grok is cool" if they mention it, because they're always sucking off Elon

We are making this choice because 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.

I'm surprised how clear they are about this.

Related:

Can highly recommend Zed as an alternative, it's better than VSCode with the Codex extension as managing multiple chats is much nicer in Zed.

Zed: https://zed.dev/

The products are basically equivalent but JetBrains is a profitable bootstrapped company that has been building IDEs for 20 years and Cursor is a flash in the pan startup with a squillion dollar valuation to support. Sooner or later they’re going to do something that will fuck their users over.

And selling to SpaceX was it!

    We are making this choice because 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.

For a company named "Open" AI, they've been hardly open at all and the slew of resignations of top tier execs in the company is really the proof.

Make no mistake, this isn't a moral decision. This is just killing the competition using morality as an excuse.

i loved switching between sol / fable / grok 4.5.

... and something tells me fable might not be available on cursor for much longer :/

i work in qa so i'm naturally wary of adding another critical dependency to a development workflow, if the model you actually want can just disappear because two vendor change ownership or start argueing then the wrapper has to be really good on its own.

cursors harness and its own models may be good enough that users stay, and if they do cursor has a moat at least. if everyone follows the openai models out the door, it will just become a polished ui.

Distillation is a threat to frontier model companies, but that doesn’t make it dangerous or wrong. OpenAI can (and likely will) use the same logic to ban you from using open source harnesses.