“It Boils Down to Trust”: OpenAI Is Cutting Off Cursor

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OpenAI says it will stop serving its models to Cursor on November 12. The reason it gave is the same one running through this entire week.

OpenAI notified SpaceX on Friday night that it will wind down the contract supplying its models to Cursor, with a shutoff date of November 12. The trigger was ownership: SpaceX bought Cursor’s parent Anysphere for $60 billion in stock in June, and the contract carries a change-of-control clause with a limited window to exit. OpenAI took the maximum notice the agreement allows.

The company’s stated reason was not technical. “It boils down to trust,” OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux said, as The Decoder reported. OpenAI says it cannot be confident SpaceX will operate inside its terms of service, and it cited history: the roughly $2 million a year licensing deal for the full Twitter feed that Musk cut off in December 2022 after deciding the price was too low, and Musk’s admission in litigation that he distilled other labs’ models to train Grok.

Then OpenAI named the thing that makes this week’s version different. With Astra, its forthcoming model with advanced cyber capabilities, the company says there is “a new level of accountability” required of partners. That is the trusted-access argument, applied to a customer.

Cursor’s answer came fast. Co-founder Michael Truell put OpenAI at about five percent of Cursor’s AI traffic and said the company is talking to OpenAI to find a solution. “Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI, we’ve worked closely with their team for years, and we’ve trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business.” Musk said he couldn’t care less.

Nobody in this business has clean hands on it. Anthropic cut off Windsurf in June 2025 once OpenAI moved to buy it, and cut off OpenAI itself that August over Claude use in benchmarks. On Saturday Anthropic’s Tom Brown was on X calling Cursor a trusted partner since Sonnet 3.5 and promising more Claude capacity inside it.

One thing OpenAI did not mention: two days earlier, Reuters reported that Russian-speaking criminals had used Cursor’s own AI agent to break into seven companies. OpenAI’s letter rests on Musk’s contract record, not on that. Both are true. Only one is in the letter.