will move forward with its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Cursor as Elon Musk’s space exploration and AI company seeks a competitive edge against rivals Anthropic and OpenAI after its last week.
SpaceX that it had the rights to buy Cursor, or pay $10 billion to 鈥渨ork together鈥� with the company.
In a regulatory filing Tuesday, SpaceX said that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary when the deal closes in the third quarter.
Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX has described as Cursor’s wide 鈥渄istribution to expert software engineers鈥� is likely part of what made it attractive to Musk’s company, giving it access to a new customer base.
When it first announced the potential acquisition, Cursor said the partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI would enable it to build future AI products using xAI’s massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.
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.
SpaceX became a public company on Friday in what is largely considered a successful debut. Shares of the company have jumped since Friday, and are up 9% before the opening bell Tuesday.
Copyright © 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.
