I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with. Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
Couldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality? I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
Everyone is playing hardball. No one wants to be IBM in an IBM-Microsoft dance.
But this is kind of like banning GPU exports to China. It will encourage them to develop their own technology. Yes, it will take them longer, but in the long-run China will be more successful with their own GPU tech.
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans. Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
I've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans. Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
Enterprise customers are not getting the subsidized subscriptions so for them the point is moot.
Everyone is playing hardball. No one wants to be IBM in an IBM-Microsoft dance. But this is kind of like banning GPU exports to China. It will encourage them to develop their own technology. Yes, it will take them longer, but in the long-run China will be more successful with their own GPU tech. The same could be true of SpaceX/xAI
LOL
You had me until:
>The same could be true of a company run by a drug addict.
Elon Musk is nowhere near as capable as millions of intelligent developers in China.
If you have such a world changing technology, why sell an API when you can capture all the value yourself? That's what every provider is asking themselves. Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.
Being a pure play model provider is completely untenable right now. Coding agents own your demand; Nvidia, data centers, and DRAM manufacturers own your supply. You're getting squeezed by open weight models. Your only bet to making money off this thing is by locking your model down to your program to have some semblance of a moat. The fact that businesses can change providers with just the change of an API key is unsustainable. You have neither the "hard to switch" lock-in of a traditional software company nor do you have the near-zero marginal cost of production they have. Each token of inference costs you money, not to mention the training costs. At least locking the models down to your harness lets you get some sort of lock-in.
Is it really an excuse? As the release points out, musk admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI’s models to produce xai models on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think about goose for the gander wrt IP theft, I wouldn’t voluntarily do business with a competitor who was actively and brazenly flouting my terms, would you?
It's amusingly ironic to talk about "IP theft" in the context of AI models.
Shorthand. I agree it’s hypocritical and theft isn’t the right word, but we make do with the words we have.