SpaceX closed its $60 billion buyout of Cursor's parent company on August 14, and two weeks later OpenAI said it's walking away from Cursor entirely, cutting model access on November 12.
Aman Sanger just turned into a billionaire several times over. The 25-year-old MIT grad and chief operating officer of Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, walked away with roughly $2.4 billion in SpaceX stock when Elon Musk's rocket company closed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of the AI coding startup on August 14, 2026, according to Forbes. Two weeks later, OpenAI explained why it's cutting off Cursor's access to its models after the SpaceX acquisition: it doesn't trust a Musk-controlled company to honor its usage terms, and the access ends November 12.
The math alone is startling. Anysphere was valued at $29.3 billion in a funding round earlier this year. By the time SpaceX's board signed off, that number had doubled to $60 billion, backed by roughly $4 billion in annualized revenue, according to reporting from CNBC and Seeking Alpha. SpaceX handed over about 391 million Class A shares to get it done, folding Cursor into a newly rebranded SpaceXAI division with access to SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer.
The deal itself moved fast for something this size. SpaceX first structured the acquisition in April, Anysphere's board signed off in June, and the transaction formally closed in mid-August, an unusually tight four-month sprint for the largest startup acquisition on record. It also skips the path most AI startups take toward an exit. No public offering, no roadshow. Just an all-stock swap that keeps Cursor's four founders, and its several hundred engineers, inside Musk's orbit instead of sending the company toward a Nasdaq listing.
OpenAI cuts the cord #
Then OpenAI pulled the plug.
SpaceX agreed to acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in stock on June 16, days after its IPO. Simultaneously, Cursor is making its deepest India push yet with a localized Rs 649/month plan, as it races to lock in market share ahead of the ownership change. - SpaceX acquisition of Cursor AI - Cursor pricing strategy India market
In a public post on August 29, OpenAI said it would wind down the contract that lets Cursor route coding requests to GPT models. The stated reason wasn't pricing or a technical dispute. It's distrust, stated plainly. OpenAI said it can't be confident a Musk-controlled entity will honor the terms of its agreements, pointing to a pattern the company says it has seen with other Musk businesses. It's also withholding its unreleased Astra model from Cursor entirely. Not just cutting existing access - blocking the next one too.
What the cutoff means for customers #
Here's the number that actually matters if your company runs Cursor: OpenAI's models account for roughly 5% of Cursor's AI traffic, according to co-founder Michael Truell. That's it. Cursor's editor already routes requests across Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and its own in-house models alongside GPT, so most coding sessions won't feel the cutoff at all come November 12.
Cursor says 64% of Fortune 500 companies use its tool, and more than 50,000 enterprises build with it. For those customers, the practical disruption is smaller than the headline suggests. The real cost is optionality. Losing GPT-5 as a routing choice narrows the menu, and it sets a precedent that should worry every AI-dependent company watching from the sidelines: a model provider can now treat a change of ownership as grounds to walk away from a contract, not just a breach of usage.
Sanger's path here is its own story. He started coding at 14, studied at MIT, and co-founded Anysphere in 2022 with Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark. Four years later, each cofounder holds SpaceX stock worth roughly $2.4 billion, per Forbes' accounting of the deal's terms.
Frankly, this is the Musk-Altman feud finding a new venue. The two men have sued each other, sniped at each other on X, and competed for the same research talent for three years running. Now one of Musk's companies owns a tool that Altman's company helped power, and Altman's answer is to take the power away rather than keep collecting a licensing fee off a rival's asset. Cursor will run fine on Anthropic and its own models. What doesn't survive as easily is the idea that AI infrastructure contracts are just business, not a battlefield.
Cursor has until November 12 to finish moving any remaining GPT-dependent workloads off OpenAI's models. After that, the access simply stops.
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