Today is the day OpenAI said it would pull its models out of Cursor — and as of this morning, nobody on either side will say whether the plug is actually being pulled.
The deadline was set in August, when OpenAI notified SpaceX that it intended to wind down the contract supplying its models to the AI coding editor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. The trigger was ownership: SpaceX agreed in June to buy Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal, and the acquisition has since closed. But OpenAI called November 12 a proposal, not a final cutoff — and as of yesterday, the two companies were still talking, with no word on whether the models were still live inside the editor.
The stated reason was blunt, even by the standards of the OpenAI–Elon Musk feud. "We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts," OpenAI wrote. The company pointed to Musk cutting off its Twitter data feed after buying the platform in 2022, and to Musk admitting under oath this year that xAI had violated OpenAI's terms — a practice known as distillation, using one lab's model outputs to train another's.
For most Cursor users, the practical damage is small, and Cursor knows it. Co-founder Michael Truell said OpenAI models account for only about 5% of Cursor's traffic, and Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Cursor's own Composer models are unaffected — Anthropic said within hours of the announcement that it would add compute for Claude inside Cursor. Developers who do rely on GPT models can still plug in their own OpenAI API key, and OpenAI says it will keep supporting its coding extensions inside editors like Cursor.
But the cutoff is not just about the models Cursor uses today. OpenAI also said it will not supply future models to Cursor, naming its upcoming Astra model — the one reportedly built with advanced cyber capabilities — as off-limits. That turns a contract dispute into a structural one: the most popular AI coding editor on the market, a business reportedly doing about $2.6 billion a year with close to two-thirds of the Fortune 500 as customers, may never get OpenAI's next flagship.
That is the real story of deadline day. AI models used to feel like infrastructure — neutral, always on, available wherever developers worked. OpenAI just showed they are leverage, and who owns the tool now decides which models it can run. Watch the model picker today: if GPT disappears, the era of the neutral model supplier is officially over. If the two sides announce a deal instead, the lesson is the opposite — that even a $60 billion acquisition and a years-long feud can still be negotiated at the last minute.
— via The Decoder