OpenAI ends contract with Cursor, acquired by SpaceX... "Musk's past is the problem"

[Financial News]  

OpenAI said it will terminate its contract with coding startup Cursor. The company cited concerns that Cursor, after being acquired by Elon Musk's SpaceX, could not be trusted to honor the previous terms of the agreement. SpaceX recently acquired Cursor for $6 billion.
Musk helped found OpenAI, but later left the company and filed a lawsuit against it.
According to Business Insider on the 29th local time, OpenAI said in a statement the previous night that Cursor would no longer be able to access OpenAI models starting November 12.
The statement said, "This decision is incredibly harsh," given that the company wants its AI models to be widely used by developers, but added, "We nevertheless had no choice but to make that decision." It explained, "Given that Elon Musk's companies have not honored contracts in the past, we could not be confident that SpaceX would use our technology under the terms of our service."

The issue was not that Cursor had violated any terms, but that SpaceX was likely to fail to honor the contract, based on the behavior of Twitter, which Musk previously owned.
Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022, merged with SpaceX in February.
In a blog post, OpenAI cited a report by The New York Times saying that Twitter had previously violated contract terms and that, on Musk's orders, OpenAI was denied access to Twitter data. OpenAI also pointed to Musk's acknowledgment earlier this year that xAI had breached its contract by training its Grok AI model on OpenAI's output.
According to a report by The Verge in April, Musk said at the time that it was partly true that xAI had "distilled" OpenAI models.
Cursor, an AI coding editor, has offered models from a range of companies within its software, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Experience Center, and SpaceX AI. Paid users are said to be able to use OpenAI's GPT-5.6, Sol, and Terra models.

OpenAI said it will not provide Cursor with next-generation or future models, including the upcoming Astra model. However, it has not yet been made clear exactly how the service cutoff will affect existing Cursor users or which models will be impacted.
There are concerns that if access to OpenAI's latest models is restricted, users may shift to Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini.
Meanwhile, the decision appears to stem from the long-running feud between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Musk.
Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman last year. He argued that the company's shift from a nonprofit research lab to a partially for-profit entity violated its founding mission. However, a federal jury dismissed the case, saying the statute of limitations had expired.


[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter