SpaceX buys Cursor for $60 billion, Justice Department backs xAI

SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor, the AI coding startup formerly known as Anysphere, in an all-stock deal worth roughly $60 billion — its largest purchase ever and a sharp pivot into AI software days after its record public offering. Cursor was valued near $29 billion in its last round, so the price marks a steep premium. The deal folds one of the most popular AI coding tools into SpaceX's xAI division and pits Elon Musk directly against Anthropic and OpenAI in the developer market.

The US Justice Department urged a court to let xAI keep running 57 unpermitted natural-gas turbines at its Colossus data centers near Memphis, arguing a shutdown would threaten national, economic, and energy security. The filing backs xAI against a Clean Air Act lawsuit from the civil-rights group NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center, who say the turbines have worsened air quality in an already-polluted region. It is a striking case of the federal government intervening to shield a frontier AI lab's infrastructure from environmental enforcement.

ChatGPT's share of monthly AI assistant users fell to about 46 percent in May, dropping below 50 percent for the first time, according to Sensor Tower's annual report. Google's Gemini has climbed to nearly 28 percent and Anthropic's Claude to about 10 percent, helped by ecosystem tie-ins and strong retention. ChatGPT still leads with 1.1 billion monthly users, but the slip signals that brand trust and values are starting to move users, not just features.

Internal financial documents reviewed by the press show OpenAI is on pace to lose about $14 billion this year, having burned through $3.7 billion in the first quarter against $5.7 billion in revenue. The figures land just days after OpenAI confidentially filed for a US public offering, sharpening questions about the economics behind the AI boom. The company still expects to reach $100 billion in annual revenue and turn profitable by 2029, but cumulative losses could near $44 billion first.

Anthropic canceled a planned billing change for its Claude Agent SDK on the very day it was set to take effect, telling subscribers "nothing changes for now." The reversed plan would have moved automated agent usage out of the standard subscription pool and into a separate monthly credit billed at full API rates — a shift developers warned could sharply raise costs. The about-face arrives amid a deepening price war with OpenAI and continued pressure on Anthropic from its standoff with the US government.

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab released Qwen-Robot, a suite of three foundation models that give robots the software to navigate spaces, manipulate objects, and predict how the physical world will respond. The manipulation model was trained on more than 38,000 hours of data and topped a leading robotics benchmark. The launch pushes Alibaba's open-model strategy from chatbots into embodied AI, where Chinese firms are racing to build a common operating layer for the coming wave of humanoid and warehouse robots.

Google DeepMind, working with the UK government and three local councils, built an AI tool that drafts planning assessments, checks proposals against local policy, and summarizes public objections for housing applications. Early trials in Barnet, Camden, and Dorset aim to cut decision times in half and could save councils around 255 hours a year, with a national rollout planned for 2027. Human planning officers keep final say — the AI handles the paperwork bottleneck that slows the UK's goal of 1.5 million new homes by 2029.