Congratulations Cursor on being acquired by SpaceX!
This is the scenario model freedom was built for.
Cursor reportedly just sold for $60 billion. To SpaceX. Which already owns xAI.
Update: SpaceX obtained the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or, alternatively, pay $10 billion for the work they did together.
When a coding tool gets acquired by an AI lab, users don’t get more choices; they get fewer. This is a pattern. Anthropic pulled model access from Windsurf the moment acquisition talks with OpenAI were public info. That was how this industry works. Every major lab wants to own the full stack: the model and the tool sitting on top of it. Control the tool, control what developers reach for every day. Control what they reach for, and you control which models win.
The endgame is lock-in. Your coding assistant becomes a distribution channel for whatever model the parent company needs to push.
Think about what made Cursor worth using in the first place. It wasn’t the interface alone. It was the fact that developers could reach for Claude when they needed deep reasoning, GPT-4o when they needed speed, and whatever else was best for the job at hand. That flexibility was the product. It was the reason engineers trusted it with real workflows.
SpaceX has an AI strategy. It’s called xAI. They spent $1.25 trillion worth of equity absorbing it in February. You don’t make that bet and then happily route Cursor users to Anthropic’s models. You route them to Grok. You fund xAI’s next release. You use Cursor as a growth lever for the model you already own. That’s just how businesses work.
Cursor was under pressure. OpenAI (Codex) and Anthropic (Claude Code) both gained significant traction this year. They were embraced quickly. Cursor found itself fighting uphill on two fronts: defending market share from tools backed by the very labs whose models Cursor depended on, while also shopping for its next funding round. SpaceX was a lifeline. A $50 billion one.
But lifelines come with strings. The string here is that Cursor users are inheriting Elon Musk’s AI roadmap, whether they asked for it or not.
There’s also the Anthropic question, which is more immediate than the xAI consolidation story. Anthropic pulled access from Windsurf during acquisition talks. Not after acquisition. During. The logic is straightforward: if a competitor is about to buy a distribution channel that runs your models, why hand them more leverage? Cursor users who rely heavily on Claude should take that precedent seriously. It could move fast.
This matters beyond just Cursor. What’s happening here is the broader consolidation of the AI coding market into vertically integrated stacks. OpenAI has its own coding product. Anthropic has its own coding product. Google has its own coding product. Each of those labs has clear incentives to favor tools they own or control. The independent, multi-model layer is shrinking.
Kilo doesn’t have a model to sell. We have a tool to build. That means Opus 4.7 when it is best, GPT-4o when GPT-4o is best, Mistral Large 3 when it’s the right tool for the job, and the next breakthrough model the moment it’s available – whoever ships it. We have no incentive to steer you toward any particular model.
That’s model freedom. It sounds simple because it is. Use the best tool for the job. Don’t let your coding assistant’s corporate parent make that decision for you.
The Cursor news is a reminder of why that principle matters.
UPD. If you want to reduce that concentration risk, use this guide to migrate to Kilo.
Well, we need more time to evaluate the acquisition, lets not get ahead of ourselves
For now, SpaceX hasn't acquired Cursor; they are partnering to improve Composer. We'll see what happens later, as SpaceX has the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion.