❯ Cursor’s co-founder responds: OpenAI is 5% of traffic; Musk “couldn’t care less”

both sidesResponding to OpenAI ending model access for Cursor on November 12, co-founder Michael Truell said OpenAI models account for just 5% of Cursor’s user traffic, noting Cursor was among OpenAI’s very first users, worked closely with its team for years, and had “trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure.” Musk’s response to the dispute was four words: “I couldn’t care less.”

what led hereThe trigger was SpaceX completing its acquisition of Cursor parent Anysphere. OpenAI invoked the contract’s change-of-control clause, stating it “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.” Anthropic promptly said it would keep supplying Cursor and add compute. Per The Information, the 5% figure is Truell’s damage-limiting framing — it says both that the impact is contained and that OpenAI’s share inside the most popular coding tool is already low.

on neutralityTruell’s phrasing is where the real information sits. Startups had treated model supply as neutral public infrastructure, and it turns out to move with the cap table. Technical leaders running architecture reviews now have to log “who might acquire this vendor” as a risk item, and multi-model access shifts from optional to default. It also explains why “model agnostic” is starting to sound the way “cloud agnostic” once did.

▪ SIGNALOne line — “I thought it was neutral” — demoted model supply from infrastructure back to a commercial relationship.