OpenAI cuts off Cursor after SpaceX acquisition, citing Musk’s history of breaking contracts

OpenAI is ending its contract with the AI coding tool Cursor after SpaceX acquired the company, saying that Elon Musk’s companies have repeatedly broken contracts. Musk’s companies have a track record of breaking contracts, OpenAI says The suspension is the latest chapter in a years-long feud between Musk and OpenAI that has also played out in court.

OpenAI specifically accuses Musk of breaching contracts after his acquisition of Twitter and of trying to extract data. The AI lab had a licensing deal with Twitter that gave the company access to the full tweet data feed for about $2 million a year to train ChatGPT. When Musk found out about the agreement in December 2022, he thought the price was too low and cut off OpenAI’s access.Ad Cursor says OpenAI accounts for just five percent of its AI traffic Cursor co-founder Michael Truell responded quickly, saying OpenAI models made up only about five percent of Cursor’s AI traffic. The company is in talks with OpenAI’s team to find a solution. “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,” Truell writes.Ad OpenAI knows how being cut off feels. In June 2025, Anthropic blocked the coding tool Windsurf from accessing its Claude models after reports surfaced that OpenAI wanted to acquire Windsurf. In August 2025, the tables turned on OpenAI when Anthropic revoked the company’s API access because OpenAI teams had apparently used Claude for internal benchmarks ahead of the GPT-5 launch. Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.