OpenAI says it will end Cursor's model deal on November 12; Anthropic offers to replace it
OpenAI's shutoff date for Cursor lands on November 12, and the five percent of traffic it removes is the smallest part of what is being tested: a $60 billion acquisition built on selling rival labs' models, owned by a company that also leases them their compute.
Richard Tang · 2 min read
OpenAI$1.18T — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $1.18T has six days left on Cursor. On October 30 it told SpaceX+5.51% — SpaceX, up 5.51 percent today, which bought Cursor's parent Anysphere for about $60 billion in stock in August, that it will wind down its model agreement and proposed a shutoff date of November 12, the maximum notice the contract allows 1. The revenue at risk is small; the question it forces is not.
Cursor's$30B — Cursor, private, latest valuation $30B whole pitch to its 50,000-plus teams is neutrality: it sells Claude, Gemini and xAI$200B — xAI, private, latest valuation $200B models without picking a winner 2. A $60 billion asset built on that pitch now has one less leg under it 2.
Anthropic is the replacement, and also the landlord's best customer
OpenAI's stated reason is trust, not price: it says it cannot be confident SpaceX would honor its terms, citing X and xAI breaching their own OpenAI contracts 1. Cursor co-founder Michael Truell, now a SpaceX executive, says talks are under way; Musk answered that he "couldn't care less" 1. Truell has put a number on the exposure: OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor traffic 7. Within hours of the notice, Anthropic$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B, which is not a neutral party, offered Cursor increased compute and higher Claude usage limits 7.
That replacement is the part no filing prices. Anthropic already pays SpaceX about $1.25 billion a month to lease Colossus capacity, and Google about $920 million a month for GPUs 4. What Cursor pays Anthropic for model calls partly flows back to its own owner as compute rent. Neutrality survives, but as an internal transfer inside the Super Intelligence segment, which earned $7.56 billion in the third quarter, about half of SpaceX's revenue 4.
Cursor's annualized revenue grew 26-fold in 17 months
Data
| Annualized B2B revenue ($B) | |
|---|---|
| Jan 2025 | 0.1 |
| Nov 2025 | 1 |
| Jun 2026 | 2.6 |
No filing yet prices what OpenAI leaves behind
The balance sheet carries the bet. SpaceX's goodwill jumped to $48.4 billion from $11.8 billion at year-end, mostly Cursor, and no filing yet shows what the OpenAI agreement was worth 3. Cursor is meanwhile turning model calls into unit economics: its November 5 release builds and hosts live apps with databases and authentication inside the editor 6.
Watch November 12, not the press releases 4. If Cursor's usage holds with OpenAI gone, the shutoff proves frontier-model access has become a purchasing decision, and Anthropic, the supplier that is also the landlord's best customer, wins the traffic. If it does not, the neutrality discount belongs on SpaceX's $40 billion GPU lease too 4.
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