A billion-dollar blow to Anthropic's IPO: How Musk snatched Cursor from a competitor for $60 billion
The artificial intelligence market is experiencing a tectonic shift. Elon Musk, using SpaceX shares as a currency, acquired Anysphere — the developer of the popular AI tool for programmers, Cursor. The deal was valued at $60 billion and closed in record time, literally just days before the planned IPO of Anthropic.
This is not just a technology purchase. It is a direct blow to one of Anthropic's key revenue sources. The fact is that Cursor was built on the Claude model. Every engineer writing code through this platform was, in essence, a paying customer of Anthropic "under the hood." The tool became a staple for a significant portion of Silicon Valley and many engineering teams from the Fortune 500. The flagship Composer feature, built on Claude Sonnet, became one of the most beloved products for programmers, even coining the term "vibe coding" — where a developer describes a task in words, and the AI writes the code.
Anthropic's corporate revenue surged in 2025 largely thanks to Cursor. Now, this channel is lost. The financial mechanism of the deal is equally interesting. Not a single dollar in cash changed hands: all $60 billion was paid in SpaceX shares. Musk used SpaceX's stock market rally hype to "print" these shares and immediately spend them on the acquisition. SpaceX investors, meanwhile, faced dilution of approximately 3.4%.
Why is this linked to Anthropic's IPO? Data from the service Ramp shows that Cursor's share among corporate clients was declining: from 41% in June 2025 to 26% in May 2026, losing ground to GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. Investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, valued Cursor at $50 billion, considering this price aggressive. Musk paid 20% more for a company that, according to analysts, is "losing ground in the race."
My analytical assessment of the situation: Musk pursued this deal because his own AI division, xAI, was facing serious difficulties. By the end of March 2026, all 11 of its co-founders had left the company, and Musk himself admitted that xAI was "built incorrectly from the start." For SpaceX to have a compelling AI story before going public, the easiest path was to buy a brand that engineers already trust. And this purchase came precisely in the window between Anthropic filing for its IPO and setting the offering price.
It is important to understand: interpreting all of this as a planned attack on Anthropic's IPO is an analytical hypothesis, not an established fact. However, if Anthropic cannot quickly convince Wall Street that the lost revenue from Cursor can be replaced, then one of the most anticipated IPOs in the AI field this year could be at risk. The market is losing the largest external growth driver for Claude, and this creates tremendous uncertainty for the valuation of the entire company.