Cursor's new plans bill Claude from the very first request

"We are without a doubt their largest customer," Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger said of Anthropic in January 2025. Cursor now belongs to Grok maker SpaceX, and, as Vincent Schmalbach writes on Vincentschmalbach, the Cursor plans launched on October 12 include Grok usage but no included Claude usage.

At a glance

• Cursor's new plans are sold in SpaceX's X Subscription bundle alongside Grok and X Premium. xAI's own models come from an included pool, and Claude is billed separately at API list prices.
• According to Reuters, Anthropic made almost $4.6 billion in 2025, and nearly a quarter of that came from two unnamed customers. The author is pretty sure Cursor is one of them.
• Defaults are the problem for Anthropic. Claude still works in Cursor, but new subscribers pay extra from the first Claude request, and the $8 Plus plan offers no Claude at all.

If you have not followed the story, the friction started well before the deal. In January 2025 Anthropic did not have enough GPUs for all of Cursor's traffic, as the author wrote at the time. In January 2026 Anthropic cut off xAI developers who had been using Claude through Cursor. xAI co-founder Tony Wu told his staff that this pushed xAI to build its own coding product and models.

On the $30 Premium plan Grok is included, and Claude Opus 5.5 costs $20 per million output tokens

Until now a Cursor subscription came with Claude. According to Cursor's docs, the old $20 Pro plan included a pool of usage for outside models like Claude. The new plans are part of what SpaceX calls The X Subscription, a bundle of Grok, Cursor and X Premium. xAI's announcement promises each plan "at least twice as much coding usage with our models as the comparable Cursor plan," meaning Grok and Cursor's own Composer.

Outside models are "billed separately at API list prices via top-ups." Say you sign up today for the $30 Premium plan. Your Grok requests come out of a weekly pool included in the price, and each Claude request is billed on top, for example Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. On the $8 Plus plan you get only Grok models and cannot pick Claude at all.

The old plans are closed to new sign-ups. Current subscribers keep their included Claude usage until they switch, so the change reaches newcomers first and everyone else whenever they move to a new plan.

OpenAI is ending Cursor's access on November 12, while Anthropic chose to stay

The ownership change came in steps. In February SpaceX took over xAI, and on August 14 it completed its $60 billion purchase of Cursor. According to SentiSight.ai, the route there was an option: in April 2026 xAI got the right either to buy Cursor for $60 billion or to pay $10 billion for a joint working arrangement. CNBC reports that SpaceX announced on June 16 that it would buy Cursor in an all-stock deal.

Cursor said the deal gives it "access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world," according to SentiSight.ai. Within two weeks of the closing, OpenAI said it will end Cursor's access to its models on November 12, because it "cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service."

Anthropic went the other way and stayed. Six weeks after co-founder Tom Brown posted this, Cursor moved Claude out of the included usage in its new plans:

Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We'll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX.

Two customers brought in nearly a quarter of Anthropic's $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue

Anthropic is preparing for an IPO, and its draft prospectus shows how much it depends on a few customers. According to Reuters, Anthropic made almost $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025, and nearly a quarter of it came from two customers. The prospectus also warns that many of its largest clients are not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.

The prospectus does not name the two customers. In August 2025, VentureBeat reported that Cursor and GitHub Copilot drove about $1.2 billion of Anthropic's revenue. The author is pretty sure Cursor is one of the two and thinks the second is most likely Copilot, which belongs to Microsoft.

The proportions have shifted since then. Anthropic's revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was more than $11.5 billion, up from $787 million a year earlier, so Cursor is a much smaller part of Anthropic today than it was in 2025.

Why does a per-request fee matter when Claude is still on the menu?

Because defaults decide most requests. Think of a phone plan with unlimited calls on one network and a per-minute charge for every other: you can still call anyone, but most of your calls go where they cost nothing extra. The author makes the same point: when one model is included and the other costs extra from the first request, most people use the included one.

That habit shows up directly in Anthropic's bill. Cursor still pays Anthropic for the Claude requests its users make, so each user who moves to the included Grok usage lowers that bill. Anthropic has not lost Cursor as a customer, the author stresses, but he thinks it has lost Cursor as its biggest one.

Copilot has a similar lever. Since August, its automatic model selection can pick Microsoft's own coding model, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, and that is how Copilot Free and Student users get it. Claude is still in Copilot, but Microsoft now has its own model to send requests to.

How big the hit will be is still unknown. The prospectus does not name its two big customers, VentureBeat's $1.2 billion figure counts Cursor and Copilot together, and no one has published how many Cursor users still pick Claude. In our view, Claude at full list price next to an included weekly Grok pool on the same $30 plan will likely leave Claude as the expensive exception for new sign-ups.

OpenAI's November 12 exit and Anthropic's IPO

The next fixed date is November 12, when OpenAI ends Cursor's access to its models. No date for Anthropic's IPO has been given. When it happens, Anthropic will go public with a customer-concentration warning in its prospectus while Cursor belongs to a competitor that pushes its own model. The author expects investors to notice, and he would not be surprised if Anthropic loses more big customers the same way.