SpaceX confirmed on Tuesday that it will acquire Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in stock. Just two days after the largest IPO in history, Elon Musk is using his fresh public-market currency for the biggest AI deal ever.
What happened
The acquisition didn’t come entirely out of the blue. SpaceX secured an option back in April: either pay $10 billion for a partnership or $60 billion later for the whole company. Musk made the call in just two trading days.
Cursor is one of the most popular AI coding assistants on the market, with annualized revenue hitting $4 billion in early June. Millions of developers use it daily to write, refactor, and debug code.
Why this matters for Anthropic
Here’s where it gets really interesting for the Claude world: Cursor once accounted for up to 50% of Anthropic’s revenue. The tool ran almost entirely on Claude models. That dependency had been loosening — Cursor started building its own models, and Anthropic launched its own coding tools.
Still, the SpaceX acquisition fundamentally shifts the balance of power. SpaceX is now positioning itself as a direct competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI in the coding space. The big question: will Cursor stick with Claude models, or pivot to its own or alternative models under new ownership?
The numbers in context
$60 billion for a coding tool — let that sink in. For reference, Anthropic’s last valuation was around $60 billion. SpaceX is paying roughly the same for Cursor as Anthropic is worth in total.
The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
My take
This is one of those moments where the tectonic plates of the AI industry shift. SpaceX wasn’t an AI player yesterday — now they’re one of the biggest. For Anthropic, it’s a wake-up call: when your biggest customer gets swallowed by a competitor, you need to diversify fast. Claude Code, Cowork, and the growing enterprise customer base just became even more critical.
And for us developers? Cursor is going to change. Whether for better or worse remains to be seen.
Sources: TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg