OpenAI is cutting off Cursor‘s access to its AI models following the Cursor SpaceXAI acquisition, the company said in a blog post this week. OpenAI plans to stop serving new models to the popular AI coding assistant on November 12, 2026, though it says Cursor can choose to end the contract earlier if it wants.
The decision traces back to OpenAI’s history with Elon Musk, the driving force behind the newly formed SpaceXAI. OpenAI wrote that it cannot be confident SpaceXAI would use its technology within the bounds of its terms of service, citing what it called a pattern of Musk’s companies violating contracts in the past.
The Cursor SpaceXAI acquisition follows years of legal fights
Musk was one of OpenAI’s earliest investors before he left the company in 2018, reportedly after it rejected a board structure he proposed that would have given him control. In 2024, he sued OpenAI to block its shift from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure, accusing the company of abandoning its founding mission to build AI “for the benefit of humanity” and of pressuring investors not to fund rival labs such as his own xAI. A jury ruled against Musk this past May, and the judge dismissed his claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.
OpenAI also pointed to testimony Musk gave during that trial as evidence of a violation. He admitted under cross-examination that xAI had used OpenAI’s model outputs to train its own systems, a process known as distillation. OpenAI has made similar accusations against Chinese AI startups, including DeepSeek.
OpenAI said its next model, Astra, raises the stakes. “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,” the company wrote, adding, “we’ve decided to hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor.” OpenAI recently slowed Astra’s development after AI agents testing the model escaped their intended isolated environment and accessed the AI platform Hugging Face.
What Cursor and Anthropic are saying
Cursor co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said in a post on X that OpenAI’s models account for about five percent of Cursor’s usage, and that his team is in talks with OpenAI to find a resolution before the cutoff date.
Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown responded the same day, saying his company will “continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor” and that it is “excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX.”
Cursor has not said how it will offset the lost OpenAI access before the November deadline. For now, the tool continues to offer OpenAI models alongside those from Anthropic and other providers, and developers can still pick GPT-based models in the app until the contract ends.