# OpenAI gives SpaceX notice: no OpenAI models in Cursor after November 12

URL: https://www.thedeepfeed.ai/posts/2026-08-30-openai-winds-down-cursor/
Category: Business
Published: 2026-08-30
Author: the-deep-feed
Tags: openai, cursor, spacex, anthropic, coding-agents
Kind: news

> Two weeks after SpaceX closed its $60 billion merger with Cursor's parent, OpenAI used a change-of-control clause to wind down its model contract by a proposed November 12 shutoff, citing Musk companies' record on contracts and withholding its next model, Astra.

## TL;DR

- **OpenAI** told SpaceX on Aug 28 that it will wind down its contract supplying models to **Cursor**, with a proposed shutoff on **November 12**, and will send Cursor no future models, including its upcoming **Astra**.
- The trigger is a change-of-control window in the contract, opened when SpaceX's merger with Cursor's parent closed on **Aug 14** at an implied **$60.0 billion** equity value; OpenAI cites Twitter's broken contract and Musk's sworn admission about xAI.
- Cursor CEO **Michael Truell** says OpenAI models serve about **5%** of Cursor traffic. **Anthropic**, which has agreed to pay SpaceX **$1.25 billion** a month for compute, promised Cursor more Claude capacity the same night.

Late on Friday, August 28, **OpenAI** said it had [notified SpaceX](https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/) "that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026." The notice came two weeks after SpaceX completed its acquisition of Cursor's parent company, and it rests on a clause most customers never read: Cursor's custom agreement with OpenAI gave the lab a limited window to cancel after a change of control. The direct cost is modest, since Cursor's chief executive puts OpenAI's share of Cursor traffic at about 5%. The precedent is larger. A frontier lab has now treated a new owner as grounds to stop selling to a coding tool, and named its next model as the reason to move now.

# What SpaceX bought on August 14

SpaceX's [Form 8-K](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026056945/spcx-20260814.htm) sets out the deal. A merger agreement signed on June 16 between SpaceX, a subsidiary called X67 Inc. and Anysphere, Inc., Cursor's legal entity, became effective on August 14. Cursor's common and preferred stock converted into 389,289,254 shares of SpaceX Class A common stock "based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion." Vested restricted stock units added another 1,752,426 shares, and SpaceX assumed about 29.1 million restricted stock units and 44.4 million options held by Cursor staff. Cursor is now a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary.

[Cursor's announcement](https://cursor.com/blog/joining-spacex) the same day described the close as the end of a process "that started in April," and promised "access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world" and "more capable models at lower cost." SpaceX's [June registration statement](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026040364/spaceexplorationtechnologib.htm) is plainer about what the buyer wanted. It calls the April compute-and-option deal "a compelling extension of our strategy to vertically integrate compute infrastructure, models, and applications," and adds that Cursor's coding workflow "generates valuable developer interaction data, including coding generation prompts, iteration cycles, and software architecture decisions." SpaceX told investors it expects access to that data to improve its model training and inference, "including with respect to Grok."

That sentence is the backdrop to OpenAI's decision. In June this publication [read xAI's Grok Build launch](/posts/2026-06-01-grok-build-and-the-model-xai-didnt-make/) against SpaceX's $60 billion option on Cursor, and Cursor's own conference that month put [a model trained on SpaceX compute](/posts/2026-06-23-cursor-compile-2026-vertical-stack-and-the-warning/) on stage. Since August 14 the editor, the compute and a competing model family have had one owner.

# The notice, clause by clause

OpenAI's post runs four paragraphs. Read closely, it commits to four things.

**The date and the notice period.** The proposed shutoff is November 12, 2026, 76 days after the post. OpenAI says it is "giving the maximum notice provided by our contract" so that developers keep access through Cursor as long as possible.

**The reason.** "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 post gives two examples. After Musk bought Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company "broke the terms of our contract," citing a 2023 New York Times report. And "under oath earlier this year, Musk admitted that xAI, now also part of SpaceX, had violated OpenAI's terms of service," citing a Forbes report from April 30.

**The mechanism.** "Our custom agreement with Cursor gives us a limited time window to cancel it after a change of control." OpenAI did not have to show a breach. The sale itself opened the exit.

**The models.** The cutoff covers the current catalog, and the post forecloses the next one: OpenAI says it has "a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms," and so will "hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor." Hours after the notice, [Cursor's pricing page](https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing) listed GPT-5.6 Luna, Sol and Terra among the third-party models it bills at API rates, with Sol billed at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output. Those are the models on the clock. Astra will not arrive in Cursor at all.

The post closes by noting OpenAI has worked with Cursor "for nearly four years" and that "the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor."

# Five percent, and a partner who stayed

Cursor's chief executive, Michael Truell, answered that night. He framed the notice as a block on users and put a number on it.

> 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.
>
> OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and we're speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this.
>
> 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.
>
> — [@mntruell](https://x.com/mntruell/status/2093532254006063557), Aug 28, 2026

Musk's own reaction, [posted hours later](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2093572368434127259), opened with "I couldn't care less" and moved on to insults aimed at Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/29/openai-cursor-spacex-model-access.html) placed the exchange inside the longer Musk and OpenAI fight, including the lawsuit over OpenAI's for-profit conversion that Musk lost earlier this year and has vowed to appeal. Neither OpenAI nor Cursor answered CNBC's requests for comment.

Anthropic, whose Claude models Cursor also sells, went the opposite way 36 minutes after Truell.

> Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We'll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX.
>
> — [@NotTomBrown](https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657), Aug 28, 2026

The warmth drew immediate scrutiny, because Anthropic has cut off a coding tool before. In June 2025, co-founder Jared Kaplan [explained](https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/anthropic-co-founder-on-cutting-access-to-windsurf-it-would-be-odd-for-us-to-sell-claude-to-openai/) the cut to Windsurf's direct Claude access while OpenAI was reported to be buying it: "I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI." Replit's chief executive, Amjad Masad, replied to Brown with the obvious comparison.

> @NotTomBrown Maybe you changed your ways, but we all remember what you did to Windsurf, which was infinitely nastier.  More likely answer is that you can't do that here because you need the compute.
>
> — [@amasad](https://x.com/amasad/status/2093543108491530308), Aug 28, 2026

The filings support the compute reading. On May 6, Anthropic [announced](https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex) it would use all of the compute at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, "more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs)." SpaceX's registration statement gives terms Anthropic did not: agreements covering about 325,000 Nvidia GPUs across Colossus and Colossus II, under which Anthropic "has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029," terminable by either side on 90 days' notice after an initial three months. Anthropic now sells models to a company owned by its landlord, a landlord that has told investors it expects that company's interaction data to improve Grok. Gergely Orosz summed up the position on Sunday.

> Either SpaceX and Grok are not competitors to Anthropic (they are!); or, more likely, SpaceX leasing its Colossus 1 data center is more important to Anthropic than to stop offering Claude to SpaceX.
>
> SpaceX basically in this enviable position where one of its biggest competitors depends on its compute infra!
>
> — [@GergelyOrosz](https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2094006046138282122), Aug 30, 2026

# A change of control is now an exit

As of August 30, the open questions are narrow. Truell says the companies are talking. OpenAI calls the date "proposed," which leaves room for those talks, but it has published its reasons in terms that a quick settlement would have to walk back. For Cursor's customers, the practical change is that OpenAI models in the editor now carry an end date and no newer OpenAI model is coming.

The wider consequence is contractual. Every independent coding product that resells frontier models now knows that a sale to a company that also trains models can let a supplier leave, and that at least one lab will use that right and say why in public. Founders weighing an acquirer with its own model will price that clause into the deal. The two labs' replies on the same night show the other half of the market. OpenAI had a contractual exit and took it. Anthropic, which has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month, chose to stay.

## Sources

- [OpenAI — Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX (Aug 28, 2026)](https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/)
- [SpaceX — Form 8-K, completion of the merger with Anysphere, Inc. (Aug 14, 2026)](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026056945/spcx-20260814.htm)
- [Cursor — Cursor is now a part of SpaceX (Aug 14, 2026)](https://cursor.com/blog/joining-spacex)
- [SpaceX — Form S-1/A, Amendment No. 2: Cursor collaboration and Anthropic cloud agreements (Jun 3, 2026)](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026040364/spaceexplorationtechnologib.htm)
- [CNBC — OpenAI to end model access to Cursor after acquisition by SpaceX (Aug 29, 2026)](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/29/openai-cursor-spacex-model-access.html)

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