Elon Musk’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor is a huge win for its AI business. It also leaves a big open question for Anthropic, which counted Cursor as one of its biggest customers. Musk’s Grok models have historically underperformed their counterparts on coding tasks, but Cursor’s vast swaths of data will help SpaceX mount formidable competition to Anthropic and OpenAI.
Currently, Cursor charges coders monthly subscription fees to use its software, which offers models created by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic (which, in turn, get paid for the compute customers are using). But Claude Code’s increasing prices provide an opening for Musk’s Grok, which can position itself as a cheaper and efficient alternative. And with Cursor’s own proprietary models running on SpaceX’s compute resources, the company may be able to capture both the revenue from subscriptions and from users choosing Grok and Cursor models.
It’s likely xAI will want to develop Cursor into a full-blown harness that competes with Codex, Claude Cowork, and Google’s Antigravity. Developing Grok frontier models alongside that harness will create even more efficiency and capability. Even if customers continue to choose Anthropic’s models, SpaceX sees upside from the rent the Claude-maker pays to use Musk’s Colossus data center.