OpenAI said on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, that it notified SpaceX it will wind down the contract that puts OpenAI models inside Cursor, the AI coding tool SpaceX bought this month in an all-stock deal valued at about $60 billion. The proposed shutoff date is Nov. 12, 2026. Future OpenAI models, including the upcoming Astra, will not go to Cursor during the wind-down.

"Today, we notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026," OpenAI wrote in a post titled "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX." "To maximize the time that developers can retain access to our models through Cursor, we are giving the maximum notice provided by our contract."

"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," the company said. It pointed to X, formerly Twitter and now part of SpaceX, for breaking an earlier OpenAI contract after Musk's acquisition, and said Musk admitted under oath earlier this year that xAI — also now part of SpaceX — had violated OpenAI's terms of service.

OpenAI said its custom Cursor agreement included a limited window to cancel after a change of control, and that it chose the latest date that window allows while withholding future models. "We've worked with Cursor for nearly four years and have enormous respect for their team, their product, and what they've built for the developer community," the post said.

Michael Truell, Cursor's co-founder and now a SpaceX executive, answered on X that OpenAI models account for about 5 percent of Cursor user traffic and that the companies were talking. "We're sorry to see that OpenAI put out a note saying they plan to block Cursor users from accessing OpenAI models in three months," he wrote, according to CNBC and Reuters. "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 replied on X that he "couldn't care less," Reuters reported, and again called OpenAI's Sam Altman and Greg Brockman untrustworthy. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown posted that Cursor had been a trusted Anthropic partner since Claude Sonnet 3.5 and that Anthropic would "continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor."

SpaceX announced the Anysphere/Cursor acquisition in June and completed it earlier in August. OpenAI's move is a change-of-control cancellation dressed as a safety and contract story. The people who feel it first are developers who pick models inside Cursor. Truell's 5 percent figure, if accurate, is Cursor's math. OpenAI's Nov. 12 date is OpenAI's calendar. Neither company has published a joint termination agreement.

Sources