OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seems to be on throughout an occasion on the startup campus Station F, on the sidelines of the Synthetic Intelligence Motion Summit, in Paris on Feb. 11, 2025.
Aurelien Morissard | AFP | Getty Photos
Earlier than coming into into talks to accumulate synthetic intelligence code-writing startup Windsurf, OpenAI checked out shopping for an alternative choice: Cursor.
The ChatGPT creator final yr reached out to Anysphere, the startup that sells the Cursor software, two folks accustomed to the matter advised CNBC. OpenAI reached out once more this yr as Cursor was having fun with a brand new wave of recognition. The talks once more failed to realize traction, one of many folks mentioned.
OpenAI declined to remark. Anysphere didn’t reply to a request for remark. Bloomberg reported final month that Anysphere was in talks to lift funding at a valuation of near $10 billion.
OpenAI has just lately engaged in talks to pay about $3 billion to accumulate AI coding device Windsurf, CNBC reported Wednesday, following a narrative revealed by Bloomberg. Ought to a Windsurf deal happen, it will be by far OpenAI’s most costly acquisition up to now.
Sam Altman, OpenAI co-founder and CEO, mentioned on social media website X that his firm’s new o3 and o4-mini reasoning fashions, launched on Wednesday, are “tremendous good at coding, so we’re releasing a brand new product, Codex CLI, to make them simpler to make use of.” Anysphere mentioned on X that the 2 new giant language fashions, or LLMs, can be found now in Cursor.
Cursor’s desktop software gained reputation final yr for offering coding help by drawing from Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet mannequin. In October, Microsoft added help for Anthropic’s Sonnet mannequin in its GitHub Copilot assistant, and weeks later, some programmers reported that Cursor was preferable to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot.
The world’s high know-how corporations are spending a whole lot of billions of {dollars} to construct information facilities stuffed with Nvidia graphics processing models that may construct and run these LLMs. The fashions are being deployed throughout the company world, in areas resembling gross sales, customer support and legislation.
Among the largest advances have come from making use of AI to software program. It has gotten so good that tech corporations have discovered themselves attempting to catch coders who use AI to cheat in job interviews, CNBC reported in March.
Marking the shift in that sentiment was a February publish on X by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. He coined the time period “vibe coding” to explain the method of directing AI to jot down code. Karpathy talked about Cursor and Anthropic’s Sonnet within the publish, and didn’t seek advice from OpenAI fashions.
Since then, the tech business has flocked to Cursor and quite a few related companies, together with Bolt, Replit and Vercel. A couple of million folks have been utilizing Cursor each day as of March, in keeping with Bloomberg.
OpenAI met with greater than 20 corporations within the AI coding area, in keeping with an individual accustomed to the matter.
Anysphere, primarily based in San Francisco, was based in 2022 and was producing upward of $100 million in recurring income as of January. Buyers embody Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Thrive Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. Cursor relies on Microsoft’s open-source Visible Studio Code editor.
— CNBC’s Hayden Area contributed to this report.
