In a late-night blog post last Friday, OpenAI The company said that it was ending its partnership with CursorOpenAI, the company behind the popular AI programming tool on the market. OpenAI stated that the company could not trust Elon MuskWhose company is it? SpaceX recently acquired Cursor In a deal worth $60 billion.
OpenAI has lost one of the most important clients. OpenAI charges Cursor to use its AI-coding editor to provide ChatGPT’s models. According to people with knowledge of the situation, Cursor ranked among OpenAI’s top five revenue-generating customers at the beginning 2026. OpenAI had estimated that Cursor could bring ChatGPT more than $1billion in revenue annually by the spring this year. This was based on its performance.
OpenAI has not previously disclosed the figures that show how much financial damage it is prepared to incur to stay away from Musk. OpenAI declined comment. WIRED’s requests for comments from SpaceX or Cursor were not responded to immediately by their representatives.
“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,” OpenAI blogged about the project.
OpenAI is preparing to launch its new product, OpenAI. go public next year, it’s trying to show investors a more stable business—ideally one that doesn’t rely so heavily on the goodwill of Musk. OpenAI, according to reports, now generates over $40 billion In annualized revenues, Codex generated over $500,000 in revenue from subscriptions, advertising in ChatGPT and sales of access to the AI-coding tool Codex.
OpenAI may have not suffered as badly financially from losing a large customer such as Cursor, but the decision was still difficult. The company acknowledged in its blog post that ending the partnership may damage its standing with developers—a community it has spent years carefully working to win over—by cutting off a major channel they use to access OpenAI’s models.
Michael Truell responded to OpenAI’s announcement on Friday, hours after the initial OpenAI announcement. Truell is currently leading teams at SpaceX. post on XChatGPT’s model only “serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic.” It was meant to convey that OpenAI’s models are not popular among Cursor developers and won’t have a significant effect on their business.
Thibault sottiaux, OpenAI’s director of core products and Thibault was very quick to respond. point out The token is a way to show your support for the cause. “not a proxy for revenue nor value created,” Truell asked him to “share the math” The 5 percent figure is a misleading number.
WIRED has previously reported on the hopes of Cursor leaders to remain a platform OpenAI, Anthropic and other third-party AI model providers. This is true even after SpaceX acquired them. AI experts thought that was wishful thinking because they assumed that the breakup of Cursor/OpenAI had been predetermined for a long time. OpenAI, as it grows Codex and becomes a significant AI coding firm, is increasingly competing for Cursor’s customers. The companies, both as competitors and partners, have been working together for more than a year.
Evidently, this arrangement could no longer be made with Musk controlling Cursor. OpenAI might have decided that the SpaceX AI model distillation risk was not worth its Cursor Partnership. The company noted in its blog post that, earlier this year, Musk seemingly said that xAI—now a part of SpaceX—used OpenAI’s models to train its own. Musk made the apparent admission during his deposition for OpenAI in Musk’s lawsuit, where he said that Sam Altman & Greg Brockman were responsible. stolen a charity The two men worked together for about a decade. An earlier federal jury dismissed this suit.
