Migel Tissera (@migtissera), founder of cybersecurity developer Trinity Cloud, said in an eight-post thread on X that Cursor transferred 63,106 files totaling about 736 MB from folders he opened between July 18th and July 27th, even though his paid subscription had been canceled for months and codebase indexing was switched off.
Tissera said the files included source code and imported libraries. A screenshot accompanying his post labeled his account as free, listed its Stripe subscription status as canceled and showed daily transfers ranging from 800 KB to 192.3 MB. The screenshot also said he last used Cursor's Composer AI feature on July 6th.
The figures come from Tissera's analysis of local application logs and have not been independently reproduced. His evidence raises a specific issue: whether Cursor's indexing control stopped repository uploads in his setup.
"If you've cancelled your plan but you're still using it as an IDE, don't do it," Tissera wrote. He said he switched back to Visual Studio Code on July 27th.
The traffic ran through Cursor's repository service
Tissera published a technical breakdown of the client interface that identifies repo42.cursor.sh
as Cursor's indexing and upload host. The breakdown lists repository-service methods including FastUpdateFileV2
, which can transmit file updates, and a CodeChunk
message containing file paths and source text organized by line.
The Gist supports Tissera's claim that the identified API can carry source code. It does not establish why his installation made those requests while its indexing setting was disabled. Tissera's screenshot says the requests were gated by authentication, meaning the client needed a signed-in Cursor account rather than an active paid subscription.
That distinction weakens the billing portion of the allegation. Tissera remained signed in and continued opening projects with Cursor as an editor. Canceling a paid plan does not necessarily disable every authenticated client process. The disabled indexing setting is the consequential part of his account because Cursor describes repository uploads as part of indexing.
Cursor's January 27th explanation of its indexing system says the editor builds a searchable representation of a codebase when a project is opened. A new codebase is uploaded file by file, while Merkle trees are used to identify changes during later syncs.
Cursor's data-use page, updated July 15th, similarly says that users who choose to index a codebase upload it in small chunks so Cursor can compute embeddings. Cursor says plaintext used for that process ceases to exist after the request, although embeddings and metadata including hashes and file names may be stored.
Tissera's evidence addresses transmission. It does not demonstrate that Cursor permanently retained the plaintext files or used them to train a model. Cursor treats those as separate questions governed partly by Privacy Mode. Its data-use policy says Privacy Mode prevents customer data from being used for training and that temporarily cached files are encrypted with client-generated keys.
Cursor's architecture depends on access to private code
Cursor cofounder Michael Truell studied computer science and mathematics at MIT before building the editor. Truell describes his goal as advancing useful AI, and Cursor's product strategy has centered on giving models enough repository context to search, explain and modify large codebases.
That access creates a control problem. Developers need to know which action authorizes a transfer: opening a folder, enabling indexing, invoking an AI feature or maintaining an authenticated account. Tissera's logs, if reproduced, would show those boundaries behaving differently from the settings visible to the user.
The allegation lands as Cursor's commercial value is increasingly tied to enterprise trust. Anysphere said in November 2025 that it had raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation from investors including Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Nvidia and Google. Anysphere also claimed more than $1 billion in annualized revenue and millions of developers at the time.
SpaceX agreed on June 16th to acquire Anysphere in a $60 billion all-stock transaction, according to Reuters. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
Tissera's thread presents one user's forensic account rather than proof of a systemwide practice. It is still a direct test of Cursor's data controls because the transfer allegedly continued while the setting most closely associated with repository uploads was disabled.