SAN FRANCISCO (AP) 鈥� says it has the rights to buy artificial intelligence coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year as Elon Musk’s space exploration and AI company looks for ways to compete with rivals Anthropic and OpenAI ahead of a .
SpaceX said that, alternatively, it could pay $10 billion to 鈥渨ork together鈥� with Cursor.
SpaceX announced the deal Tuesday on , which along with the AI chatbot Grok is part of a constellation of properties that Musk has merged into his rocket company.
Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX describes as Cursor’s wide 鈥渄istribution to expert software engineers鈥� is likely part of what makes it attractive to Musk’s company, giving it access to a new customer base.
Cursor said its new partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI will enable it to build future AI products using xAI’s massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.
鈥淲e鈥檝e wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we鈥檝e been bottlenecked by compute,鈥� Cursor said in a statement on X, which didn’t mention the possibility of being acquired. 鈥淲ith this partnership, our team will leverage xAI鈥檚 Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models.鈥�
Cursor, which started in 2022, helped sparked a as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming.
Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology.
It was Cursor鈥檚 Composer, combined with Anthropic鈥檚 Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase 鈥渧ibe coding” in early 2025.
Copyright © 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.
