On August 28, OpenAI announced its intention to terminate the direct provision of its AI models to the Cursor editor. The proposed cutoff date is set for November 12, 2026, although the final deadline has yet to be agreed upon by both 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
This decision comes in light of Cursor's ownership change: on August 14, SpaceX acquired its developer, Anysphere, for $60 billion. Following the acquisition, management stated that they would leverage the computational resources of the new parent company to develop more efficient and cost-effective models.
Skepticism Towards SpaceX
OpenAI expressed concerns that SpaceX might not adhere to licensing requirements for their technologies, referencing past experiences with Elon Musk’s businesses.
According to the ChatGPT developer, after acquiring X in October 2022, Musk's company failed to meet its contractual obligations. In 2026, Musk confirmed under oath that xAI had also breached terms of use.
The agreement with Cursor includes a limited period for termination following a change of control. OpenAI clarified that they chose the latest possible date to provide partners with additional time to transition.
However, under this agreement, Cursor will not receive future models from OpenAI. The ChatGPT developer also mentioned the upcoming Astra model, which will have stricter compliance controls in place.
The collaboration lasted nearly four years.
OpenAI Models Will Not Completely Disappear from Cursor
Cursor co-founder Michael Truell estimated that OpenAI models contribute roughly 5% of the service's user traffic. The parties are still in discussions to resolve the dispute.
The end of the partnership does not mean that OpenAI will vanish entirely from Cursor—users will still be able to access the company's models via their own API key, the Codex extension for IDEs, or compatible third-party gateways.
Until the agreed termination date, OpenAI will maintain access to the models already in use unless Cursor decides to disable them earlier.
In light of this news, Anthropic’s infrastructure director, Tom Brown, stated that the company will continue to support Claude within Cursor and will 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
It’s worth noting that in July, SpaceXAI introduced Grok 4.5 for programming and AI agents. This model was developed in collaboration with Cursor and made available directly within the editor.