OpenAI Stops Providing AI Models To Cursor Amid Feud With Elon Musk

Authored by Dylan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

OpenAI said Friday that it plans to stop providing AI models to Cursor, the coding startup now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This continues a years-long public feud between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who was a cofounder and board member of OpenAI but left in 2018. SpaceX purchased Cursor for $60 billion in June.

“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 said.

In a public statement, the ChatGPT-maker said it notified SpaceX that it is winding down its contract and proposed a shutoff date of Nov. 12 – the latest date allowed by contract, according to OpenAI.

The company said that after Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X – which has since been merged into SpaceX – the company broke the terms of OpenAI’s contract, but didn’t specify in what ways.

The Epoch Times reached out to OpenAI and SpaceX and is awaiting a response.

Cursor cofounder Michael Truell said on X on Aug. 28 that OpenAI models serve about 5 percent of Cursor traffic and that the company is speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this issue.

In response, Anthropic cofounder and Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown said on X the same day that the company, which already partners with SpaceX, will increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor.

Musk replied to OpenAI’s statement on X later that day, saying, “I couldn’t care less.” He added that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman are “untrustworthy” and repeated his previous accusation that the pair “stole” an open source nonprofit.

The former cofounders’ bitter feud has taken the form of social media comments, accusations of betrayal, and a high-stakes court case.

In 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its cofounders, including Altman and Brockman, alleging that they betrayed the company’s founding agreement of advancing it for the good of humanity as an open source charity that would counter the existential risks of profit-driven AI.

Musk also accused the pair of defrauding him out of $38 million in donations, as well as allowing Microsoft to step in in 2023 – after the firing and subsequent rehiring of Altman as CEO – and push for the resignation of board members who tried to oust him.

“With the reinstatement of Mr. Altman and the restructuring of the board, OpenAI’s corporate structure that had been designed as a system of checks and balances between the nonprofit arm, for-profit arm, the board, and the CEO to ensure the nonprofit mission [that] was being carried out, collapsed overnight,” he wrote in the suit.

The case landed before a federal court in Oakland, California, last spring, where Altman said he remains committed to OpenAI’s original mission of ensuring AI benefits humanity.

Altman went on to accuse Musk of abandoning OpenAI when he left and started his own for-profit competitor, xAI, when his bid to take full control of OpenAI was rejected.

The trial ended May 18 when a jury found Musk’s challenge fell outside the statute of limitations.