SpaceX lands deal to likely purchase Claude Code and OpenAI Codex competitor - 9to5Mac

When SpaceX isn't landing rockets, it's apparently landing AI company deals. Two months ago, the firm behind Starlink absorbed xAI, which includes Twitter-turned-X. Now SpaceX is eyeing a competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.

Cursor has been popular with software engineers who code with AI on the Mac. It was one of the first services to connect large language model artificial intelligence to the process of building apps.

Now SpaceX and Cursor are "working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI," the two companies say.

The collaboration includes a $10 billion payment from SpaceX to Cursor, or if the stars align for Cursor, a $60 billion acquisition.

Cursor shared more details about the arrangement:

Cursor is partnering with SpaceX to accelerate our model training efforts.

We released Composer less than six months ago as our first agentic coding model.

After that, Composer 1.5 scaled reinforcement learning by over 20x. Composer 2 then added continued pretraining, reaching frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost of other models. Each step up in compute has translated to meaningfully more capable models.

We've wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we've been bottlenecked by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI's Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models

Whether it's a temporary team-up or the start of an acquisition, the SpaceX-Cursor arrangement strengthens a competitor to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex agentic coding software.

As for Apple, we'll see what new AI resources the company has ready for developers at WWDC 2026 in a little over a month. Apple already supports agentic coding in Xcode.