Today, we notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. […] 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.
What a remarkable statement—and accusation—to make publicly. Such comments are generally couched in opaque corporate speak. Points to OpenAI for its plainspokenness.
To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale. After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke the terms of our contract (alongside many others). Under oath earlier this year, Musk admitted that xAI, now also part of SpaceX, had violated OpenAI’s terms of service (terms which are similar to xAI’s own).
The first link is to a 2023 New York Times article (here’s a gift link) ostensibly about Elon Musk’s contentious split with Sam Altman amid Musk’s push to compete with OpenAI. The piece opens with an anecdote about Musk’s decision to unilaterally “cut OpenAI off from Twitter’s data,” which it had been licensing “for about $2 million a year to help build ChatGPT.”
The second is to an April 2026 report in Forbes (archive link) headlined “Musk Admits Distilling OpenAI Data For His XAI,” which notes that “OpenAI’s terms of service prohibit outputs from being used to train competing AI models.”
Musk, naturally, is salty about it but pretending he’s not, spouting on X:
I couldn’t care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy assholes who stole an open source nonprofit.
Yes, calling your rivals by childish, dare I say Trumpish, names is a well-established sign of not caring.
Anthropic co-founder and Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown apparently also chose to step into the fray, commenting on X without context:
Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We’ll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX.
Mercenary.