\u201cThis decision was incredibly tough, as we care deeply about our models being broadly available for developers,\u201d the company wrote. \u201cWe 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\u2019s companies violating contracts.\u201d<\/p>\n
While that in itself was big news for anyone following the day-to-day rough and tumble of the AI industry, what was particularly notable was the response of OpenAI\u2019s arch rival. <\/p>\n
The Anthropic factor<\/p>\n
As The New Stack noted<\/a> in its coverage, Anthropic co-founder and \u201cchief compute officer\u201d Tom Brown moved fast, posting publicly within hours of OpenAI\u2019s statement to confirm that it continues to see Cursor as a \u201ctrusted partner,\u201d and will \u201ccontinue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor.\u201d<\/p>\n Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We\u2019ll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX.<\/p>\n \u2014 Tom Brown (@NotTomBrown) August 29, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n But anyone who has followed Anthropic\u2019s recent history could be forgiven for wondering why.<\/p>\n Take Windsurf. In May 2025, reports emerged<\/a> that OpenAI was in talks to buy the AI coding tool for $3 billion. Anthropic didn\u2019t hang around for the deal to close though, and within weeks, Windsurf said Anthropic had<\/a> cut its direct access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. <\/p>\n Speaking at an event hosted by TechCrunch shortly after, Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan said that<\/a> \u201cit would be odd\u201d for Anthropic to be selling Claude to OpenAI. As things transpired, the OpenAI deal fell through<\/a>, and Google stepped in instead, paying $2.4 billion<\/a> to hire Windsurf\u2019s founders and R&D staff into DeepMind. <\/p>\n \u201cThey cut them off ruthlessly when RUMORS of OpenAI potentially buying Windsurf surfaced.\u201d<\/p>\n In a social media post published on Sunday, Gergely Orosz<\/a>, engineer and author of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, is quick to highlight the episode with Windsurf, which he noted had also been a \u201ctrusted partner\u201d with Anthropic for some time. \u201cThey cut them off ruthlessly when RUMORS of OpenAI potentially buying Windsurf surfaced,\u201d Orosz writes<\/a>. \u201cNow, SpaceX, an Ant(hropic) competitor bought Cursor \u2014 it\u2019s still a trusted partner?\u201d<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s xAI, the AI company Musk founded in 2023 to build Grok<\/a>, which SpaceX acquired outright<\/a> in a February transaction valuing xAI at $250 billion. In January this year, Kylie Robison<\/a> reported that Anthropic had cut xAI staff off from Claude<\/a>, which they\u2019d been accessing through Cursor \u2014 with Cursor reportedly telling xAI it was \u201ca new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors.\u201d <\/p>\n So Anthropic has previous form for moving fast, on rumor alone in Windsurf\u2019s case, whenever a customer starts to resemble a competitor. Which makes this week\u2019s public vote of confidence for a company now wholly owned by one of Anthropic\u2019s actual rivals worth a second look.<\/p>\n The compute dependency<\/p>\n What makes SpaceX different from the previous Windsurf and xAI episodes is that Anthropic is also buying a huge amount of compute from it.<\/p>\n On May 6, Anthropic announced<\/a> it had secured the entire output<\/a> of SpaceX\u2019s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee \u2014 more than 300 megawatts of compute and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Anthropic had been hampered by limited compute availability, and the SpaceX deal, alongside other recent compute agreements, let it raise usage limits for Claude Pro and Max subscribers almost overnight.<\/p>\n Two weeks later, the financial terms came out. Per SpaceX\u2019s IPO filing<\/a>, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month for compute across Colossus and Colossus II \u2014 about 325,000 Nvidia GPUs combined \u2014 scheduled to run through May 2029, subject to termination rights.<\/p>\n SpaceX, for its part, said the arrangement would allow it to monetize some of its compute capacity while retaining enough to meet its own AI training and inference needs. As The New Stack reported in May<\/a>, the deal also underscored just how central access to compute had become to competition between the leading AI labs. And it created an unusual commercial relationship: Anthropic was now buying a huge amount of compute from a company that also owned one of its direct AI rivals in xAI.<\/p>\n And that is what makes Anthropic\u2019s response to the Cursor acquisition so notable. In response to Tom Brown\u2019s post on X on Saturday, Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad<\/a> points to the contrast between Anthropic\u2019s support for Cursor now and its treatment of Windsurf last year, suggesting the latter had been harsher than OpenAI\u2019s decision to cut Cursor off.<\/p>\n \u201cMore likely answer is that you can\u2019t do that here because you need the compute.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe you changed your ways, but we all remember what you did to Windsurf, which was infinitely nastier,\u201d Masad writes<\/a>. \u201cMore likely answer is that you can\u2019t do that here because you need the compute.\u201d<\/p>\n Orosz essentially makes the same argument. If Anthropic was prepared to cut access when Windsurf merely looked likely to end up in OpenAI\u2019s hands, why is it publicly promising MORE Claude capacity to Cursor after the company had actually been acquired by SpaceX?<\/p>\n \u201cSpaceX basically in this enviable position where one of its biggest competitors depends on its compute infra!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEither SpaceX and Grok are not competitors to Anthropic (they are!); or, more likely, SpaceX leasing its Colossus 1 data center is more important to Anthropic than to stop offering Claude to SpaceX,\u201d Orosz writes<\/a>. \u201cSpaceX basically in this enviable position where one of its biggest competitors depends on its compute infra!\u201d<\/p>\n And so this effectively highlights how strong a position SpaceX finds itself in. It now owns xAI and Cursor, putting it in direct competition with Anthropic in foundation models through Grok and in AI coding tools through Cursor, while Anthropic is simultaneously paying it billions of dollars for compute capacity supporting Claude. <\/p>\n Whatever the stated rationale for treating Cursor as a \u201ctrusted partner,\u201d that relationship leaves SpaceX with something neither Windsurf nor xAI had at the time Anthropic moved against them: a source of leverage over any decision on whether or not to cut access to Claude.<\/p>\n
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