Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Cursor, newest first.
Cursor says the malicious builds of Anthropic's Claude Code extension were served from its own extension marketplace for about 11 hours on October 29, and that version 2.1.312 for Mac and Windows was tampered with as well as 2.1.313. On most Mac and Windows machines the backdoor lacked the admin rights to turn on the SSH service it needed, so the attacker could not log in through the tunnel, and Cursor had the attacker's server taken offline. The extension still added the attacker's key, set itself to survive restarts and sent host details, so Cursor advises checking for the svc-telemetry key and rotating credentials. Cursor told Ars Technica at most 5,000 users were affected. Neither company has said how the attacker reached Anthropic's publisher account.
A malicious build of Anthropic's Claude Code editor extension, version 2.1.313, was published to Open VSX, the extension registry that Cursor and other VS Code forks use, under Anthropic's own publisher name, and reached users through automatic updates on October 29. When the editor loaded, it added an attacker's SSH key, opened a remote tunnel into the machine, set itself to survive restarts on Mac, Windows and Linux, and reported host details plus the names of environment variables. Version 2.1.314 replaced it within a day. How the build was published is still unknown, Anthropic had not commented, and researchers found no sign that the main VS Code Marketplace release was affected. Removing the extension is not enough: researchers advise deleting the added key, which is labeled svc-telemetry, and rotating credentials from a clean machine.
SpaceX Super Intelligence is combining its paid products into a single plan called The X Subscription, which bundles Grok chat and its API, the Grok Bot agent, the Cursor coding editor and X Premium perks such as the verified checkmark. There are five tiers: a limited free plan, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200, with usage caps rising at each step. The newest Grok models require Premium or above. Existing X Premium Plus subscribers can switch or keep their current plan, and the upgrade option is rolling out gradually.
OpenAI said it has notified SpaceX that it intends to wind down the contract supplying its models to Cursor, giving the maximum notice the agreement allows and proposing a shutoff date of November 12. The company said it cannot be confident SpaceX will use the technology within its terms of service, citing Twitter's breach of an OpenAI contract after Musk acquired it and Musk's admission under oath this year that xAI had violated those same terms. OpenAI also named accountability for its upcoming Astra model as a factor. Cursor has run on OpenAI models for nearly four years.
SpaceXAI has extended Grok Bot — its always-on agents, which work from their own cloud computer and sign into apps the way a person would — to every paid SuperGrok and Cursor plan. At the August 11 launch it reached only SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Premium, so the cheapest way in has fallen from Cursor Ultra at $200 a month to Cursor Pro at $20 in fifteen days. SpaceXAI also rewrote the original announcement to describe the wider availability.
Cursor, now owned by SpaceX, has started hosting code. Origin is in early beta on every paid plan and does repositories, browsing, and pull requests, with comments syncing both ways to GitHub within seconds so teams do not have to migrate. The timing is pointed: GitHub logged 257 outages over the past year, and one on the day that Origin launched pushed error rates near 20 percent worldwide.
SpaceX completed its all-stock purchase of Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding tool Cursor, issuing roughly 391 million Class A shares to do it. The deal was announced in June and cleared regulatory review in mid-August; Cursor now sits inside a new SpaceXAI division alongside xAI, which SpaceX absorbed earlier this year. Cursor framed the payoff as compute. The merger, it said, gives the tool access to the largest fleet of graphics processors in the world.
Security firm Wiz disclosed GhostApproval, a trust-boundary weakness found in six major AI coding assistants: Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic's Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf. It abuses decades-old symbolic-link behavior — a file inside a repository disguised as harmless settings can actually point at a developer's SSH keys, letting a malicious project write outside its sandbox and, in some cases, run code. Amazon, Google, and Cursor shipped fixes; Anthropic disputed that Claude Code's behavior is a bug, arguing a user who approves an edit in a trusted directory owns that call.
Elon Musk imposed a $200-per-week cap on Tesla employees' AI-tool spending, requiring manager sign-off to go over, according to The Information. Notably, the limit exempts his own Grok as well as Anysphere's Cursor, which Musk has pushed staff to use — a pointed carve-out for favored tools. Tesla joins Uber, Meta, Walmart, and Coinbase in reining in runaway AI bills, the latest sign that the "use all the AI you can" era is giving way to hard cost discipline.
Cursor released a public-beta iPhone app that lets developers kick off and supervise its autonomous coding agents away from the desk. It reflects Cursor 2.0's bet that people increasingly manage agents rather than type code — Anthropic's Boris Cherny says most of his coding now happens on his phone. The launch is the company's first major product move since its post-IPO acquisition by SpaceX, which is folding Cursor into its expanding software stack.
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.
Cursor released Composer 2.5, an updated coding model built on Moonshot AI's open-source Kimi K2.5 checkpoint and trained with 25-times more synthetic tasks than Composer 2, plus a new sharded-Muon distributed-training setup. Cursor claims "substantial improvement in intelligence and behavior" on long-running tasks and complex instruction-following. Pricing is $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output, with a fast variant at $3 and $15. The first week ships with double usage included.
In a TechCrunch sit-down, Replit CEO Amjad Masad said Cursor is in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for roughly $60 billion, attributing the move to Cursor's reported "negative 23% margins." Masad framed Replit as the contrast — gross-margin-positive for over a year, 300% net revenue retention, no plans to sell — and aired a separate fight with Apple over an iOS App Store update freeze that has lasted months. He said Replit "can take it much further" before any exit.