Elon Musk breaks silence on OpenAI cutting 3-year-old deal with Cursor over him; says: Sam Altman is …
Elon Musk has responded after OpenAI said it is ending its partnership with Cursor, a coding tool recently acquired by Musk’s SpaceX. The move ends a partnership that had been in place for around three years and adds a new chapter to the long-running dispute between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In an X (formerly Twitter) post, Musk appeared unfazed by the decision, saying he “couldn’t care less” and launching a fresh attack on Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, calling them untrustworthy. “I couldn’t care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy assholes who stole an open source nonprofit,” Musk wrote in the post.Cursor was founded in 2022. It was recently acquired by Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX. Musk had sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman for “stealing a charity” by betraying the company’s original nonprofit mission.“To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale. After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke(opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others). Under oath earlier this year, Musk admitted(opens in a new window) that xAI, now also part of SpaceX, had violated OpenAI’s terms of service (terms which are similar to xAI’s own),” OpenAI said in an announcement.
‘Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI’
Reacting to the OpenAI announcement, Michael Truell, a co-founder of Cursor and now an executive at SpaceX shared an X post where he reiterated that Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI and that the space company is “speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this”.“We’re sorry to see that OpenAI put out a note saying they plan to block Cursor users from accessing OpenAI models in three months,” Truell wrote in the post adding “OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and we’re speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this”.“Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI, we’ve worked closely with their team for years, and we’ve trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business.”
Here’s what OpenAI said on cutting off deal with Cursor
“Today, we notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. To maximize the time that developers can retain access to our models through Cursor, we are giving the maximum notice provided by our contract. This decision was incredibly tough, as we care deeply about our models being broadly available for developers. 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.To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale. After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke(opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others). Under oath earlier this year, Musk admitted(opens in a new window) that xAI, now also part of SpaceX, had violated OpenAI’s terms of service (terms which are similar to xAI’s own).Our custom agreement with Cursor gives us a limited time window to cancel it after a change of control. As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms. Given all of this, we’ve decided to hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor.We’ve worked with Cursor for nearly four years and have enormous respect for their team, their product, and what they’ve built for the developer community. We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.”
