SpaceX has won the right to buy Anthropic's rival startup Cursor for $60 billion

Elon Musk's SpaceX has been given an option to acquire AI application developer for programmers Cursor for $60 billion, seeking to close the gap with its AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic months ahead of its IPO. If SpaceX backs out of the purchase, it faces a record penalty.

Under the terms of the agreement, SpaceX has the right to acquire Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, through 2026. The companies are now "working closely together to create the world's best AI for programming and intelligent labor," SpaceX said on social network X. If it declines to exercise the option, SpaceX will have to pay Cursor $10 billion "for working together" - in fact, one of the largest termination penalties in corporate history, the Financial Times notes.

SpaceX's agreement with Cursor was preceded by Musk's admission that his AI startup xAI, which became part of SpaceX in early 2026, was lagging behind competitors in developing tools for creating software code. In March, the billionaire initiated a restructuring of xAI "from the very basics" that included downsizing and poaching engineers from the same Cursor.

Against the backdrop of agreements reached with SpaceX, startup Cursor has curtailed negotiations with investors to raise $2 billion, Bloomberg reports. The investment round was supposed to value the startup at over $50 billion. According to the agency's source, the capital raised was intended to cover Cursor's needs in computing power, but now they will be provided by SpaceX and xAI data centers.

The postponement of the takeover of Cursor sources Bloomberg explained the reluctance of SpaceX to postpone the IPO, which is expected in late June and could be the largest in history. The purchase of Cursor would have led to the need for a significant update of financial statements and prospectus SpaceX, which threatened to postpone the timing of the company's entry on the stock exchange.

The financial profile of SpaceX has already become more complicated after the merger with the startup xAI, to which Musk in March 2025 joined the social network X, pointed out the interlocutor FT. He said xAI's net loss quadrupled to $6.4 billion in 2025 from $1.56 billion a year earlier.

Cursor was launched in 2023 and is developing an AI assistant to help programmers write and debug code. The project has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history and a key player in the "wib-coding" era, Bloomberg notes. Its investors include Nvidia, Google, venture fund OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Accel and DST Global.

OpenAI is transforming its Codex product from a simple code writing tool into an independent agent with broad powers that can run in the background, open applications on the desktop and perform cursor-based actions. Developing Codex for the enterprise sector is becoming a priority for the company, which may surpass ChatGPT in importance in the future.

In this area, OpenAI is looking to catch up with its main competitor, Anthropic, which earlier released an update to Claude Code with similar capabilities. At the moment, Anthropic is one of the dominant AI vendors for business, largely due to the viral popularity of its AI agents and programming tools, states The Wall Street Journal.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor