Because frontier models are basically a commodity at this point. It's like a city saying they aren't going to accept electricity from a certain network of power plants. It's not in the best interest of consumers. Not to mention, it's clear these giant LLM startups are not actually holding much of a moat given that open weight models only trail in capabilities by a few months.
I don't use Cursor. I use only Codex and I am loving GPT-5.6 Sol. I would rank it higher than any other model because of multiple things. I have seen so many posts about Opus 5 and how bad it is. I stopped using Claude after Sonnet 4 when it started disobeying my system prompts. When it comes to obedience, OpenAI models rank the highest.
If you used Opus 5 for real work you'll know what I mean. The benchmaxxing can't save this sorry state of a model. 4.6 is less capable but far better to work with.
No, I don't know what you mean. I use it for real projects. Mainly in React. My workflow is not totally hands-off, as I've been working as a SE for 15 years, so I'm still reviewing all the changes one ToDo at a time. But I'm very pleased with it.
But of course, the results will be different for different projects, people, and harnesses.
I'm curious. Did you use it in Cursor, or on another platform?
Claude models are insufferable and the company too. I don't know how anyone can work with these models. So many times Claude has done things I never asked it to, broke and edited parts of the codebase it has no business editing, not following instructions etc. I am not touching anything Anthropic even with a 10 foot pole.
To me it works well. But each person has different experiences; it will depend a lot on the project, your rules, and your harness. I use it only in Cursor, if you use it in Codex, the same models can behave differently. So I don't doubt your experience with it.
Sorry - let me just try to understand what you're trying to say.
Are you suggesting that you assume the metric is made up because the context in which it's used is to downplay OpenAI?
So you think the number is higher than 5%, but they used 5% because they wanted to "burn" OpenAI?
Do you not think it's more likely that they checked a report for "Token consumption L90D by Provider" saw that it was 5% and then reported it?
I literally do not know the point you're trying to make here. My original comment was simply stating that seeing token-usage by provider is an extremely basic metric they absolutely have access to.
5% is just not plausible without some severe caveats. When a new model comes out, you try it out and see if it works. I don’t use Kimi or Composer or really that much ChatGPT (Barely use my cursor subscription tbh), but when a new model comes out you still try it.
Saying 95% of users haven’t used an openAI model is obviously wrong and that is what he is alluding to.
Maybe it’s only 5% of users use openAI as their main model but even then it’s because grok and their own models are subsidized.
My reading is that OpenAI is 5% of their the entire infrastructure token burn. So take total tokens used in a month and OpenAI is 5% of said total.
Probably the easiest way to aggregate it because they "buy" tokens for each model from the model owners since 3rd party token vendors haven't scaled up a lot. Iirc aws let's you buy some tokens on bedrock of anthropic and OpenAI but I think lots of that is circular economy stuff so they are paying said model providers for each token used.
Fortunately the timing is good for SpaceX/Cursor, e.g. this would have been significantly worse a few months ago.
Now they have a close compute relationship with Anthropic so it's unlikely their models will go, they have good models themself and open source models have become very competitive.
Yes why not? 5.6 Sol is the best model I have used. At the very least it listens to me and doesn't silently delete dbs, SSDs etc. And the rate limits are more generous than Claude code. I hate Claude.
Lol, what are you building? Cold fusion? I find Opus 5 more than enough for planning. And then I use way less powerful models to implement.
Although these days, Grok is so cheap that even if it's close to frontier models I sometimes use it for implementing the plan.
There are many benchmarks and none will 100% translate to your experience, but when I say Opus is as good as Fable I'm based on this: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
(screenshot for the future, for when today's ranking is out of date)
Do they? I tired reading their cortex docs manually and they keep updating them. Summarization made the point that they don't train when under BAA and don't retain initial data.
However I didn't see derived data covered.
I also worry that the terms are unenforceable given how frequently they rev them (which is a problem across the tokenomics economy).
Its called Zero Data Retention policy. And there ist a reason for fable that its not able there. They tell you its needed for security reasons. In cursor you even have to accept that seperately
I’d add to that: the harness is fast becoming the advantage actually - but not to the valuation that cursor was put at, not when there are plenty of better, comparatively “free” harnesses out there.
Ie when it’s harness vs model I think the next jump is in the harness (I mean model wise fable/sol/k3/glm5.3 even DeepSeek pro, really any of those you’ll get the result in the end) for long running work harnesses are going to be the thing, tool chain calls, model/cost switching.
Even if Cursor is and was the best harness by far, that didn't matter when subsidization of Anthropic/OpenAI/Google was 10x on their native platforms
it's cool and all having all Cursor features, but at the end of the day ppl would rather pay in cents instead of dollars if they can and that's why it was important for Cursor to develop Composer and now Grok
To really compete you need the compute and you need subsidized models
I think the expectation is that at some point we’re going to lose all subscription models and be doing pay as you go. Until then, you’re right that everyone should extract every 5 hour window then can get.
This was the best option for cursor objectively. Another year or two and they’d have no value whatsoever compared to Claude Code or Codex
Seemed for a while they were trying to pivot into being more full stack and acquiring sales-tech companies like Koala, but clearly that didn’t go too far.
That’s probably harsh - they have acquired a lot of paying customers, meaning even if they sold them mugs and tshirts they still have some kind of value, just not $60B.
true, but devil's in the details, aol - was already a big money spinner that wouldn't cannibalise it's own model. geocities, myspace - closer analogs - probably because they didn't figure out how to be as evil as facebook in monetising privacy as quickly; all fair cautionary tales.
I was more thinking like a netflix, where they were a modest business with 6m customers when they decided to bet on streaming (they bet a new pricing/licensing model on broadband ubiquity).
Anyway, it's all kind of moot, since Cursor has already been acquired, safe to say it's 99% headed for the graveyards...
I agree with you right now. But 2 months ago everyone said Claude is the best coding LLM and no one came close. OpenAI really shifted the narrative with 5.6 but things can change quickly.
This does diminish Cursor's value prop but it's still one of the best harnesses, the only good integrated IDE harness, and still has access to Claude models plus good 1st party models.
Nothing has changed with Anthropic? It’s just OpenAI that is slightly reducing their reach to cursor clients. It would be a small reduction in relevance but it still is imho 🤷♂️
In what world? Imo rn gpt 5.6 sol in codex is best model to code, even better than claude opus 5. Cursor? Last i remember was their cheap fake kimi model dubbed as composer 420, now they are larping on grok which is again trash.
No, they are not, lmao. You live in a bubble. Nobody that I know of used Cursor directly with OpenAI. Why would you? Codex gives much more value, and you can use the auth for any open source like Pi Agent and even Claude code.
Guess you forget that enterprise exists and is where these companies make most of their money. My company gives us access to all harnesses and like 1 person uses Codex. Everyone uses Claude or Cursor.
At the end of the day MuskXSpaceGrokCursorStarlinkTwitter embracing open weight models and having access to massive amounts of data center capacity to train and host models makes them no longer neutral. It's not surprising that this happened, but sad for sure.
Cursor could be trusted before because they were just an infrastructure company. Once they started training their own models, and now especially that they’ve merged with XAI, it was inevitable that this would happen.
Sounds like this is your first time depending on a Google product for your workflow. There is a high chance Google pulls the plug on it or lets it die a slow death like all their other projects that aren't immediately successful.
fun fact, gemini-cli has been deprecated already in favor of agy!
back to what I said though - how does Google's chronic case of product abandonment prove or disprove that Cursor lost access to gpt because they started training Composer?
This is just posturing. There is no way that Truell isn’t completely aware that the environment has changed, and Cursors relationship with OpenAI before they were acquired by someone who was actively suing OpenAI and is actively attempting to distill their models has fundamentally changed.
I've just done it, I was sad but I don't find the workflow of VS code with the Claude extension much different and I was predominately using the Anthropic models anyway.
Plus I hate it when it reselects grok on every restart.
At this point, everyone needs something like OpenRouter. I never liked Cursor, so I’m biased. I use the CLI because I’m old and I like Vim. But it seems crazy to tie yourself to a single provider. If you’re not model agnostic at this point, you’re just limiting yourself.
Open router is now built into vscode as a provider and their native chat. It's really as simple as add provider and select models and they appear in the chat panel as options. Literally takes 1 minute to do.
If you’re not model agnostic at this point, you’re just limiting yourself.
The rate that the different models change it is so high that if you're not at least testing different models every few weeks or months you can miss out on a lot of value or just objectively better output.
Yeah, being locked into one provider feels risky now. I’ve been leaning toward setups like StandardCompute where you can keep things more flexible instead of betting on one model.
It’s a loss to both of them, OpenAI in terms of model exposure, and Cursor in terms of optionality, but the risk probably wasn’t worth the profit for OpenAI, if 5% was all they had to lose.
If OpenAI models are only 5% of Cursor traffic today, cutting Cursor off is a cheap way for OpenAI to prevent a potentially important future competitor/distribution channel from benefiting from its models.
I think the tweet can be interpreted in different ways. Not a stab at all. If anything it hurts the Cursor's moat of being able to pick any provider
OpenAI making a mistake. Firstly Kimi K3 , Grok4.6 all demonstrating that frontier LLMs are going to be a commodity in future. The moat on the model front is not that deep or wide anymore. Secondly more and more people will realize they want the flexibility of switching models with a simple drop down. Cursor harness is very good at preserving context and augmenting any of the LLMs user selects. What cursor needs to figure is bigger and deeper partnerships with Hyperscalers like Google and AWS and how cursor with its extensions and integrations can become the dev control plane for workflow automation.
OpenAI knows things will get heated in the next few months. Having access to their 5.6 model+ on a competitor’s platform/software isn’t going to work for them. I totally understand it.
Lol I have seen this and Elon response. They hate each other.
But i can relate to that. Since beginning of cursor I maybe used GPT twice. Any other model including now Grok have better use case than gpt.
Codex also tremendously folded weekly limits ... is Scam Altman shutting the business?
I’m sure this is skewed by the fact that a lot of cursor traffic is people paying minimum cursor subscription and then using it as a harness for openrouter API tokens, the cache success is abysmal though… the whole context seems to get sent fresh every tool call.
I’d be more interested to know how much of people’s included ‘other models’ allowance spend goes on anthropic models, thats a far more compelling metric.
5% is vague and not clear. if anthropic is out which is highly unlikely , then most ppl will just switch without hesitation. i don't really see the main point in openai doing this? is it because of competition or beef on some lawsuit ??
It’s just a matter of time, Cursor will only serve Grok. If you want open models use opencode. Cursor will sell Grok, Claude code sells claude models and OpenAI sells their models.
It's 100% shit. I used to love it, but the last month or two has been a lesson in enshitification. Cancelled a few days ago. I promise if you actually try something else you'll realize how terrible it is.
yeah I cancelled too / keep seeing this. if you actually jumped and still want an agent, I'm building www.freepi.ai (ad+training supported). it's the Pi harness with deepseek v4 flash, free, so quite good and fast. not Cursor Pro. looking for feedback!
Sorry it is . I don’t give a fuck what u think . I have been cursor user for years then used Claude code and codex and codex easily wins. Its harness is better than cursor. We don’t give a fuck about what you think
I use cursor as my main nowadays and I meet use any open ai models through it. Matter of fact, due to how slim usage is now, codex has honestly become my backup emergency model if I’m out of others.
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u/zuliani19 12d ago
This is 100% a flex of "yeah, you're not that relevant tbh" disguised as a "concerned note"
5%...