The AI company announced Friday that it will stop providing AI models to Cursor, the popular coding assistant now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, citing its experience with Musk’s companies violating the terms of OpenAI’s contracts as the basis for the decision.
The announcement extends a public conflict between the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Musk, who was a co-founder and board member of OpenAI before departing in 2018. SpaceX acquired Cursor for $60 billion in June.
The company said in a public statement that it cannot be confident SpaceX will use its technology within its terms of service, given its experience with Musk’s companies breaking contractual agreements. It said it notified SpaceX that it is winding down the contract and proposed a shutoff date of Nov. 12, which it described as the latest date the contract allows.
After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, that company broke the terms of the service agreement, the company said. It did not specify what the violations involved. X has since been merged into SpaceX.
The context
The platform is among the most widely used AI-assisted coding tools and has built its product substantially around access to large language models from providers including OpenAI. Losing access to these models does not shut Cursor down, but it narrows the model options available to users and removes the dominant underlying technology in this category.
The Altman-Musk conflict at OpenAI has been public and multidimensional since approximately 2023. Musk has filed multiple lawsuits against the company, alleging that it deviated from its original nonprofit mission and violated commitments made to early backers including him. The company has defended its structure and disputed his claims. The personal and corporate antagonism has become one of the more prominent running disputes in the technology industry.
The decision to sever the Cursor contract based on prior conduct by Musk’s other companies rather than any specific action by Cursor itself applies accountability for one company’s contract behavior to an acquisition that came later, under the logic that Cursor is now under the same ownership structure as the entities that broke the original agreements.
What comes next
The new owner has access to Grok, the AI system developed by xAI, Musk’s separate artificial intelligence company. Whether the service will shift its primary model integrations toward Grok or attempt to negotiate continued access, or pursue agreements with other model providers like Anthropic or Google, has not been disclosed. The Nov. 12 proposed shutoff date gives both sides roughly 10 weeks to resolve the dispute or execute an alternative plan.
Neither company responded to requests for comment by publication time.
