Cursor was on OpenAI’s radar before Windsurf
OpenAI considered buying Cursor creator Anysphere before turning to AI coding rival Windsurf, CNBC has learned. OpenAI held deal talks with Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI coding product Cursor, before reportedly entering into talks to acquire Windsurf for around $3 billion.
Cursor has gained significant traction, with over a million daily users as of March, and was highlighted by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in February as a tool for “vibe coding.” Anysphere was reportedly in talks with investors last month to raise funding at a valuation close to $10 billion according to Bloomberg.
OpenAI reached out to Anysphere last year and again this year as Cursor’s popularity grew, but the talks failed to gain traction. Anysphere generates over $100 million in recurring revenue as of January and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Thrive Capital, and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Cursor’s desktop application gained popularity by drawing from Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, and some programmers found it preferable to Microsoft’s Copilot. OpenAI has since released new reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, which are “super good at coding,” according to CEO Sam Altman.
The development comes as major tech companies invest heavily in building data centers to support large language models. OpenAI has met with over 20 companies in the AI coding domain and is releasing a new product, Codex CLI, to make its models easier to use.
Anysphere stated that OpenAI’s new large language models are available in Cursor. OpenAI declined to comment, while Anysphere did not respond to a request for comment.