OpenAI is cutting off its models in Cursor on November 12. What do you do if you use it?

On Friday evening, OpenAI warned that, starting November 12, its models would no longer run in Cursor. For those who don't know, Cursor is the software in which a developer writes their code, except this one has an AI grafted into it that does a good chunk of the work for them. It's one of the most widely used tools in the profession, and its parent company announced $3 billion in annualized revenue in May (company figure, nobody has audited it).

And that's when you think: okay, a supplier slamming the door on a client, that happens every day. Except that in this specific case, the client is a code editor, the door is the engine that writes the code, and the notice arrives on a Friday evening for a shutdown in eleven weeks.

There are eleven weeks left. That's longer than a resignation notice, and shorter than a move.

What happened, in order

In June, SpaceX announced the acquisition of Anysphere, the company that makes Cursor. $60 billion, paid entirely in SpaceX shares, so not a single euro changes hands: Cursor's shareholders become SpaceX shareholders. The deal closes in mid-August.

Two weeks later, on August 28, OpenAI activates what is called a change-of-control clause. That's the line in the contract that basically says: I supply you because you're you, and if you change owners, I can stop everything. It sits in pretty much every serious supply contract, and it never gets used. This time, it did.

The reason given by OpenAI, word for word: “We are making this choice because we cannot be certain that SpaceX will use our technology in compliance with our terms of use, given our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts.” There you go. We're not going to spend three paragraphs on this, these are two companies glaring at each other and it won't change a single line of your code.

Four dates, two and a half months of reprieve. The fifth box is the one that interests you.

What changes your line of code, though, is the following detail: November 12 isn't a shutdown date carved in stone, it's a transition date proposed by OpenAI. The current models will continue to be served until then. Future models, on the other hand, will no longer be provided to Cursor at all. In other words, even if the two companies make up over the schedule, the tool has already been removed from the pipeline of new releases.

5% of traffic, says Cursor's boss

Michael Truell, cofounder of Cursor, responded with the number that makes the point: OpenAI's models account for around 5% of its users' traffic. Translation: out of every hundred requests sent to an AI from Cursor, five went to OpenAI, and the other ninety-five went elsewhere. Mostly to Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and Composer, Cursor's in-house model.

Take that figure for what it is. Truell said neither over what period he measured it, nor what exactly he was counting: requests? text tokens? users? It's not the same thing at all. A request saying “complete this line” and a request saying “read over these forty files for me”, that's the same 1 in a counter and a ratio of 1 to a thousand in actual consumption. So 5%, yes, but 5% of what, we don't know.

What remains true despite the uncertainty: it's not 80%. People who code with Cursor have overwhelmingly chosen something other than OpenAI's models, on their own, without being pushed into it. And I'm not exactly surprised, I spend my days in Claude Code and I haven't opened an OpenAI model for coding in a while.

What if I pay OpenAI directly?

This is THE question everyone has been asking since Friday evening, and I'm going to answer it frankly even if the answer doesn't please anyone.

The plan, in theory, is simple. You open an account with OpenAI, you get what is called an API key, a long personal code that proves it's really you knocking at the door, you paste it into Cursor, and from then on you pay OpenAI based on usage. No more intermediary, no more contract between the two companies, no more problem. That's what we've been reading everywhere for three days.

Will it work after November 12? Nobody knows. And I weigh my words carefully: neither OpenAI nor Cursor has written a single line about this specific case. I've looked, there's nothing, anywhere.

So here's why I advise you not to bet on it. Even with your own key in your pocket, your request doesn't travel from your computer to OpenAI in a straight line. It goes through Cursor's plumbing, exactly the same as the normal service. Now that is precisely the plumbing OpenAI is in the process of disconnecting. It could very well keep working, it could very well stop on the same day, and as long as neither of them has written it down in black and white, planning around it amounts to relying on a hole in a fence that is being repaired precisely now.

And even in the optimistic scenario, your key doesn't give you back the Cursor you know today. This, on the other hand, is documented in black and white, and well before this spat: a personal key is only used for chatting with the model. Agent mode, the one that goes off and modifies several files by itself while you watch, doesn't work reliably with it.

As for the gray text that appears in front of your cursor to finish your line, the one you accept by pressing the Tab key, it doesn't come from OpenAI and never has. It comes from models that Cursor makes itself. Good news while we're at it: the feature you use three hundred times a day won't move one millimeter on November 12. Bad news: your personal key therefore doesn't make you independent, you'll pay OpenAI on one side and keep paying Cursor on the other.

Your key opens the front door, not the garage. We still have to find out whether the front door will still be there in November.

One last point, this one invisible, and it deserves thirty seconds. Today, Cursor promises you that your code isn't retained once the answer has been delivered. The day you plug in your own key, that promise no longer applies: your own contract with OpenAI takes over, and it doesn't say the same thing about who has the right to keep a copy of what you send, or for how long. Your code takes exactly the same journey as before, down to the comma. What changes is the written rule at the destination. And if that code belongs to a client, that's the kind of detail that is never noticed at the right time.

The funny part: it proves that the tool isn't the engine

Now I'm going to say something that will seem counterintuitive, but I really mean it: this shutdown is good news, and it is for a reason that has nothing to do with the two companies arguing.

Two years ago, if your coding tool lost its model, you lost your tool. Today, an entire profession is being told that one of the four engines is stopping, and the answer is in a dropdown menu. You open the model selector, pick the one next to it, and carry on. Anthropic even announced right away that it was increasing its computing power to absorb people from Cursor. Tom Brown, one of the co-founders, said so publicly.

The editor is the car body. You change the engine at a red light, without getting out of the car.

This is something the industry built without meaning to, and it's valuable! Code tools started talking to several models for the wrong reasons (go for the cheapest one, work around outages, test the latest one), and the result is that no provider can hold anyone by the collar anymore. The day you can switch providers in three clicks, the provider can no longer blackmail you, and honestly I prefer this world a thousand times over the one where my code editor belongs to a single company.

If you use Cursor every day

Here’s the order I’d do things in, and it takes a quarter of an hour.

First, look at what you actually use. In Cursor’s model selector, if the name that keeps coming up for you starts with claude, gemini or composer, November 12 won't do a thing for you. Nothing. You can close this article and go have your coffee.

Next, if you're in the 5%, try the other model now and not on the evening of November 11. Eleven weeks is exactly the time it takes to calmly realize that the model next door works differently on your own project, with your conventions and your old code. You discover that by working, not by reading a comparison table.

Finally, if your company has written rules about who is allowed to see the code, read them again before plugging in a personal key. It's no longer the same contract, and this kind of detail always gets noticed at the worst possible moment.

What I think about it

What strikes me about this story isn't the falling-out. It's the speed at which a tool that hundreds of thousands of people open every morning can change owners, lose a provider and end up in the papers, all in two and a half months. A code editor used to last ten years. You installed Visual Studio and knew it would still be there for the birth of your second child.

So yes, the good surprise is that the move fits in a dropdown menu. But the real lesson, for me, is this: never base the way you work on a single provider, whoever it may be. Keep two tools at your fingertips, learn to change engines before you're forced to, and the day two billionaires fall out, you'll learn about it by reading the news instead of discovering it in front of your screen!

Sources

• Bloomberg : OpenAI to End Partnership With Cursor After SpaceX Acquisition, August 28, 2026, the announcement, the date of November 12 and OpenAI's statement
• Reuters via Investing.com : OpenAI to cut off AI models for SpaceX-owned Cursor, August 28, 2026, the $60 billion in shares, the acquisition timeline and Anthropic's reaction
• Cursor founder says OpenAI models account for just 5% of user traffic, August 29, 2026, Michael Truell's figure
• Cursor documentation : personal API keys, what the personal key covers and what it does not cover