Can Index remain a platform for OpenAI and Anthropy models within SpaceX?

When SpaceX announced Last month, it agreed to acquire AI programming startup Cursor for $60 billion, and investors believe the deal will be a boon for both companies. Cursor will benefit from access to the computing resources of a major AI lab, which it can use to train its own models. In return, SpaceX and Elon Musk will have one of the most popular AI development tools on the market.

What’s less clear is whether Cursor can remain an open platform after the deal, or whether competing AI labs will continue to be allowed to submit their models. Third-party AI models have historically played a critical role in Cursor’s business. While the company has begun training its own AI models in recent years, it has always allowed users to choose from a variety of offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI labs to power its programming assistant.

This strategy allowed Cursor to offer customers which model was the best, or cheapest, at a given moment. Anthropic and OpenAI, which count Cursor among their largest clients and feature the startup prominently in their marketing materials, also benefited.

After completing its SpaceX acquisition later this year, Cursor hopes to continue operating its AI coding product as a platform — serving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs alongside its own labs — according to people close to Cursor.

I have my doubts about how this will actually happen, but whether or not Cursor will remain model agnostic is one of the biggest questions hanging over the AI ​​industry.

Eno Reyes, co-founder and CTO of Factory, a smaller AI coding startup that competes with Cursor, says he’s not sure SpaceX’s rivals will automatically cut off Cursor’s service just because it will be owned by a rival AI lab. “I don’t know if the decision is black and white,” Reyes told me. “It’s actually very unclear to us.”

The Index declined to comment on this story. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Making enemies

This isn’t the first time Cursor’s relationship with OpenAI and Anthropic has been tested. Historically, Cursor has supplemented AI labs by distributing its models through its own programming platform. But it now increasingly finds itself in direct competition with them, with OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code becoming main lines of each other’s businesses. The SpaceX acquisition is likely to intensify this rivalry.

SpaceX and Cursor can’t say much about how they will operate post-acquisition, in part because the deal has not yet closed and remains subject to “required regulatory approvals,” according to documents SpaceX filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But SpaceX is poised to acquire Cursor’s assets, customer contracts, and intellectual property, meaning OpenAI and Anthropic will now have to deal with Musk if they want access to Cursor users.

Once the acquisition is completed, SpaceX could decide it doesn’t want to send its business toward Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its biggest competitors in frontier AI development. Anthropic and OpenAI may decide they are unwilling to sell their AI models through a Musk-owned product, which the companies’ CEOs, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, have feuded with in the past.

Historically, AI labs have not played well when it comes to selling AI models to each other. Last year, Anthropic was quick to cut off access to Windsurf after news emerged that the AI ​​programming startup was being acquired by OpenAI (the deal ultimately did not go through). “It would be strange to sell Claude to OpenAI,” Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan said at the time. In the months since, Anthropic has worked to block OpenAI and SpaceX from using its Claude AI models.