Washington (GNP): OpenAI has announced plans to stop providing its AI models to Cursor, the coding-tool company now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, marking a further escalation in the long-running rivalry between OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Musk.
The move follows years of tension between the two, which culminated earlier this year in a trial over Musk’s 150 billion dollar lawsuit against OpenAI, during which Musk’s legal team argued Altman had misled witnesses while OpenAI maintained that Musk had sought to seize control of the company.
Explaining its decision in a blog post, OpenAI says it cannot be confident that SpaceX will use its technology within the bounds of its terms of service, citing past experience with contract violations by companies under Musk’s control.
The company adds that X, formerly known as Twitter and now part of SpaceX since Musk’s acquisition of the platform, had previously breached the terms of its own contract with OpenAI.
OpenAI says that working with large partners such as SpaceX typically requires custom contracts to ensure compliance and safety at scale, and that its agreement with Cursor allowed it a limited window to cancel the contract following a change of control, with a proposed shutoff date of 12 November 2026.
Musk responded early Saturday in a post on X, saying he could not care less about the decision. He accused Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman of being untrustworthy, repeating his long-standing claim that the pair had taken over what began as an open-source nonprofit.
Musk had previously sued OpenAI and Altman on similar grounds, alleging the company had abandoned its founding nonprofit mission for private gain, though a federal jury ruled against him earlier this year, finding that his case had been filed too late.
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Despite the public exchange between the two executives, Cursor co-founder Michael Truell, now an executive at SpaceX, says the company is in discussions with the OpenAI team to try to resolve the matter.
Meanwhile, Anthropic, a rival to both OpenAI and SpaceX’s broader ecosystem but a partner to SpaceX through an existing compute arrangement, says it plans to increase compute support for its Claude models within Cursor. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown confirmed the move hours after OpenAI’s announcement, positioning Anthropic to expand its presence in Cursor as OpenAI steps back.
The dispute unfolds against the backdrop of SpaceX’s recent expansion into software. The company announced a deal in June to acquire Anysphere, the startup behind Cursor, for 60 billion dollars in an all-stock transaction, and completed the acquisition earlier this month, bringing one of the industry’s most widely used AI coding tools under Musk’s ownership just as its relationship with OpenAI unravels.
