It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.

If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.

They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.

Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use.

That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling.

>"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."

Anthropic seems to have no issues: https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20

God I hope so. My workplace enforces Cursor use, and to see it lose GPT and Claude would absolutely make my day. Much has been invested in getting us to "use the right models", a list in which Grok does not feature.

Noone is good here. Mr. Altman built a non-profit organization to help humanity, yes, that is what he said at first...

This is a battle for power, let us not be naive...

> if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything

It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.

i'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer

Why you would trust Elon Musk to not hack you and steal your model weights is beyond me, but maybe they intend to use that compute just for training, still I’m sure there’s plenty of research there to take too…

>Musk admitted to distilling their models.

what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?

running on someone else's server, you're basically giving them your weights.

Anthropic runs a significant portion of their compute on xAI hardware - why are you even talking about trying to suggest their relationship is acrimonious?

Some of you guys hate Musk so much that you say blatantly nonsensical stuff. Like, how can you be on HN and authoritatively mouthing off and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract, or the fact that xAI took down its own Grok compute capability so it could sell that compute to Anthropic? And if Anthropic hated Musk/xAI as much as you are saying they do, why would they be paying xAI billions for compute? Think/research before typing.

> It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor.

The way I review it is to let it finish a PR sized slice and then I review the whole diff in a separate terminal as if it’s a PR from someone else. Then I very impolitely list the shit that needs fixing, let the LLM grind out a new batch and repeat the process. When the code is good enough I throw it into a commit and push a PR out for other humans to review.

Clicking around in a UI would just waste time and if the change is too large to review in a terminal window the change is too large for another human to review.

Vs code copilot is the same or better than cursor in my opinion - I mean that's where cursor comes from

I code using Codex or sometimes ClaudeCode.

I use Zed to review the code.

CLI is great for most things. Some times, when I am reviewing a PR, I just tell Codex to do a diff between source and target branches in PR, and generate a HTML report. Then I read that, and also review relevant pieces of code in Zed.

I tried using Cursor, many of my colleagues use it, but stopped using it due to clunkiness. And of late, even in there, many of my colleagues use agentic coding. Instead, I prefer the snapiness of CLI (Codex coded in rust, takes less memory per session) and Zed (also coded in rust,) and blazingly fast. Zed is the new Sublime Text if you will.

Also: the ability to draft a plan and monitor its execution, review it, and merge it from a cell phone. I know Claude remote is a thing, but it’s not the same.

This is a big quality of life thing. Sure, I should just go on a walk without having an agent going, but oftentimes it’s not intruding on it - it’s the thing that actually ENABLES it.

Cursor no longer indexes your codebase.

Seems you're looking for an editor with agent, not just a agent, so something like Zed?

> I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow

Separate terminal tab with git diff/show, Zed for edits - rarely, there is little reason to change code yourself. Opus at low effort is faster than you can switch windows.

What's wrong with using VSCode with your model / API key of choice?

May be opencode2 in the near future. Sample (not affiliated) ~ 1. download opencode2 2. settings > tabs > vertical 3. add worktree setup to agents.md 4. use /diff to review changes 5. use commands for commit, sync and push

Have you tried the continuity plugin to VSCode? I think it’s still rg‘ING the source but you get control over AI edits / review and quick own edits.

Check out JetBrains Air

Codex

OpenCode IDE + Serena MCP (for the indexing part)

[1] https://opencode.ai/

[2] https://github.com/oraios/serena

I used zed with codex for the accept / reject code review feature without relying on git but yesterday the Read Only drop-down disappeared and while I was doing my code review the AI agent started vibe coding without my permission. I hate this industry.

There's OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex. I don't like to use GUIs so I rely purely on agentic AI on CLIs.

I've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.

Enterprise customers are not getting the subsidized subscriptions so for them the point is moot.

Why do people keep insisting that subscription plans are subsidized? They are not. API prices are outrageous, designed to milk enterprise users. They probably have an 80-90% profit margin on subscription plans.

Inference is cheap; Dax once said on a podcast that Opencode has a close to 90% profit margin on the openweight models it provides inference for (at 10x cheaper pricing). Those models are close in size and spec to models from large labs.

Lot of people will to spend that much. Works quite well, very useful.

What about openrouter though?

Honestly, Cursor's AI harness worked best with the Anthropic models. Could just be my bias though. Evaluating frontier LLM's all seem to be by vibes. I think the industry is understanding it's both the harness and the model that makes the difference; can't half ass either, and some harnesses do better with different models. I'm good to leave this "career." Senior software engineers, make your bag.

I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with.

Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.

Well yeah, hence why they started making their own

Token reselling stops working when providers literally won't work with you

Use cursor cli for grok pretty happy with it.

Alternate take: open source models and model routers are the real bang for your buck. Subsidized plan or not.

I just told my boss to cancel my cursor subscription. My flow is basically Claude/opencode + kyde/vscode for por changes review

Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile

Agreed. Wrapping token spend is great for pumping your revenue numbers (congrats to them on $60B!), but doesn’t seem sustainable over the long term.

Big reason we built https://boxes.dev around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.

JetBrains is a good option - works with any model/agent. Also they have very good semantic search for the codebase, which is exposed via MCP to the agents.

It's very easy to achieve that and more with: Crush (or Opencode) + OpenRouter right from the terminal. Takes a minute to setup.

currenly I use pi with openrouter and is very nice I combine with a chatgpt sub that allows me to use it with pi. and when my usage runs out I turn to openrouter. Then same when I need anthropic models

AmpCode is not popular here but I recommend it, give it I try and you will not go back, except the price may a bit expensive.

In Antigravity you can install Codex and use both. Not sure if the Claude extension can work too but probably.

you can still bring your own OpenAI key into Cursor. that is not going to change.

I like Cursor. Honestly the biggest reason is the decent WYSIWYG markdown editor.

I think they are betting that Astra will be impossible to ignore.

you dont like giving openai money but you're fine with spacex? not criticizing, just trying to understand.

It’s OpenAI (and Anthropic I’m sure) realising that they’ve somehow ended up stuck in the lowest margin part of the stack (providing inference), and trying to get out of it

Same, this will make me drop Sol from my options, not Cursor.

Why would you possibly allow companies to push you? You are the customer and you should control which models you use.

The reason it makes sense is because different models are better at different things. Allowing yourself to be locked in to a particular model by these companies is a bad idea and will lead to worse outcomes for yourself and the market as a whole.

You’d use it because until recently Cursor had the best setup for cloud agents and visual verification and a bunch of other features outside of the harness.

Because I pay $60 per month and not using the included API tokens on other models is wasteful.

Is there a good place for harness comparison/scoring?

Perhaps now they'll release a 3.0 MechaHitler version

Being a pure play model provider is completely untenable right now. Coding agents own your demand; Nvidia, data centers, and DRAM manufacturers own your supply. You're getting squeezed by open weight models. Your only bet to making money off this thing is by locking your model down to your program to have some semblance of a moat. The fact that businesses can change providers with just the change of an API key is unsustainable. You have neither the "hard to switch" lock-in of a traditional software company nor do you have the near-zero marginal cost of production they have. Each token of inference costs you money, not to mention the training costs. At least locking the models down to your harness lets you get some sort of lock-in.

5% of traffic. OpenAI models are a much higher percentage of revenue.

That's probably a lot more than their market share versus Claude Code and Codex.

Not really a surprise given their own models are the default option? Most people wouldn't change model. And if you want to use Claude or GPT you don't really have a reason to use Cursor over Claude Code or Codex

Codex has 20+ million users. They are doing much better than Cursor.

Source?

Does Grok have a subscription that competes with Claude Max $100 plan (genuinely curious)

From the article, it seems they using a clause allowing them to terminate the contract after transfer of ownership.

This clause probably has a expiry date and they are saying “we are trying not to be jerks here by waiting until the last second to trigger it”.

It makes no sense that a contract would even provide a maximum notice period. Why would parties put that in? What benefit would either derive from restricting themselves to not getting earlier notice.

Is it really an excuse? As the release points out, musk admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI’s models to produce xai models on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think about goose for the gander wrt IP theft, I wouldn’t voluntarily do business with a competitor who was actively and brazenly flouting my terms, would you?

What unique differentiator could musk possibly offer though?

Is there really a high demand for racist chatbots with no safety controls?

And even if there is, will governments even allow it to keep operating?

LOL

You had me until:

>The same could be true of a company run by a drug addict.

Elon Musk is nowhere near as capable as millions of intelligent developers in China.

Before, but they say that they’re also not going to provide astra to cursor subscribers

I trust them more than someone who took a nonprofit designed to be open and had tens of millions in donations to do just that, and then turned into a for profit who's cuddled up tight with Microsoft and is so closed they're preemptively ending contracts with someone under pretty flimsy accusations. And doubly funny it's the person who's responsible for them even existing. And from whom they stole tens of millions

The last time I tried an API Key in Cursor they limited it to the very basic Ask mode. No Agent Mode. So this is very much useless if still the case

Anthropic rents a lot of capacity from xAI, so I don't think they're in a position to do the same.

I’d be canceling for sure Grok is a huge joke and consistently destroys my Clojure files.

How so? A dozen very capable models out there. And the gap between frontier models from the two main US labs kept narrowing, at this point non existent.

The quality/price ratio is clearly superior when running Qwen, GLM, or Deepseek.

To make a product more exclusive won't hide the fact that product is becoming more and more irrelevant.

The integrated review UI is super helpful, but apparently nobody reviews code anymore except me.

We have a subscription at work. They have a CLI agent that works pretty well. Lately I mostly use it with grok, which is actually quite a capable model.

Yes, and given it's now owned by Elon Musk, who is not trustworthy, it's possible he would try to do it.

Although I wouldn't take an Openai announcement literally, as Sam Altman is also not trustworthy.

Unless you run your models and harness completely locally, you can't verify your data isn't being used.

All of these companies, and I truly mean all, stole data to train their models.

They need time to build a cursor equivalent.

Because it doesn't matter anymore for current models and they want to show goodwill, probably.

I can't imagine it would.

Yeah, the "go above and beyond for our users" implies they have a "better" version of Cursor coming. Probably integrating their new chip/microphone based product.

OpenAI acquired Ona in June https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona/

codex is already great.. cursor is just a competing harness

codex growth at 20mill now, prob more cost effective to allocate that compute to people directly paying now

I used cursor extensively both at work and for personal use. Its harness is pretty darn good but I basically never used OpenAI models in it.

The first party cursor models (initially composer and now grok-cursor) and price very competitively for their quality and have very generous usage limits included in the base plans, and then per token pricing afterwards.

Occasionally I’ve used some of the Anthropic models in it but found their cost massively outweighed the benefits for the type of usage we do.

I was using Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6 for a while but the newer models are a lot more expensive at the per-token pricing.

Cursor does currently allow users to BYO OpenAI token. Given Cursor won't have access to OpenAI models for prompt engineering/evals though, there's definitely a question of whether they'd allow picking any new OpenAI models, assuming the BYOK option continues to exist at all.

According to Cursor CEO, it only accounts for 5% usage of cursor, so it's not a big deal at all

It's basically not going to affect them at all. I don't know a single person that uses OpenAI models via Cursor. Saw another comment say it was 5%.

At least capitalism isn't at the center of the most impactful technological revolution in human history.

show me a communist country

And to announce it on a Friday night. Brutal.

Sam and Elon have a long standing feud. This is more than just bad blood between companies.

Elon Musk openly admitted to distilling OpenAI's models during his lawsuit against OpenAI. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo...

The way I read the article was that they will continue providing their current models, but won't let them use any newer ones announced even between now and the end date. But I might be wrong.

> we’ve decided to hold the contract cancellation to the latest date we can while not providing future models to Cursor.

Devin Automations is the most obvious one: solid UX, but can get very expensive to run.

There are also a bunch of newer startups in this space. I'm building one myself, https://boxes.dev -- we're very early but building for this exact use case. Some other ones worth a look are Factory Droid and Amp Orbs. Those two build their own agent harness (like Cursor), whereas with boxes.dev we run the native codex and claude code harnesses directly.

More generally, Musk admittedly works with a "move fast and break things" mentality. His companies have repeatedly broken environmental laws, labor laws, and securities laws. His companies often fail to deliver the features they promise and routinely miss deadlines they've committed to. They routinely violate contracts that they have agreed to.

Not doing business with them is a completely normal and unremarkable decision.

No love for Sama, but Musk is bond villain levels of shady.

The man is an outright existential threat to democracy.

“Satan is probably even shadier than Beelzebub”

I've been using Cursor with Grok 4.6 a lot over the last week or so. Grok Build as well. Both options are performing very well for me.

Grok? Google?

I'm not a fan of Elon, nor do I use Cursor, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't the only models.

All good points. However, it's not a safe assumption that everyone operates that way. People probably use the flagship models because that's what they know. Sure, some probably just use the default, in this case Grok.

Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok.

Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.

Cursor is like one of the least economical ways to use Claude and OpenAI, virtually nobody does it. You use Cursor for their autocomplete/composer + grok. For using Claude and Codex, you get immeasurably more bang for your buck just using them directly.

You assume OpenAI doesn’t turn off access to OpenRouter too.

Strategically, OpenAI long-term will want to own the direct relationship with all their customers. As will most major AI labs.

They already have open models.

https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing

Well, one has a pretty popular harness.

Codex cli is open source rust project (Claude Code is not). Whisper is an open weight ASR/STT model. GPT-OSS is an open weight LLM that can run locally and is still very capable. CLIP is an open source model used for image encoding. Just some of the open contributions from OpenAI

Correct. It's killing the competition. Which is what you should do if you want to run a successful business.

I use Cursor because I listened to YouTube interviews with the teams behind most of these products and I trusted their team the most.