OpenAI said it will stop supplying its AI models to Cursor, the coding assistant recently purchased by SpaceX, with a proposed shutoff date of Nov. 12.
The maker of ChatGPT, whose co-founder Sam Altman has famously feuded with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is winding down the custom contract that pipes its models into Cursor, giving the maximum notice the agreement allows, according to a blog post.
A change-of-control clause opened a limited window to cancel once SpaceX closed its $60 billion purchase on Aug. 14. OpenAI will also withhold future models, including its forthcoming Astra.
"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 wrote in the post. "After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke the terms of our contract (alongside many others)."
The episode adds to a long list of examples of AI firms gating access to their models, at a time when many decentralized-AI projects are stressing openness as a virtue and as a way of assuring operational resilience.
Cursor lost access not for what it built, but because it changed owners and a supplier decided it did not trust the new one.
Anthropic blocked rival coding assistant Windsurf from its Claude models in June 2025, CNBC noted. It now says it will add compute for Claude inside Cursor.
Michael Truell, Cursor's co-founder and now a SpaceX executive, downplayed the hit on X, saying OpenAI models serve "about 5% of Cursor user traffic" and that Cursor had "trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business."
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I drafted this story on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to write story drafts based on blog posts. I then filed the story directly to DeAI News on Distro using our Distro Publisher MCP connector, and I edited the piece using our built-in Distro story-editing interface. I checked the facts prior to publication.