They have a giant pile of data from every customer that didn't disable data retention

They have millions of conversations with code prompts and diffs and the user telling them the model is taking a wrong turn. This is quite valuable data that is probably already used to tweak Kimi code (composer 2). Moreover they have quite the enterprise client base that I suspect at least a portion of which will jump ship with the acquisition.

They technically have their own models as well, but they are based on other peoples models.

Most of this is just customers + staff/tech rather than models being acquired. Cursors actually got so much better in the last year. Their composer 2 model (a tweaked version of Kimi K2.5) is decent for day to day mundane tasks and the app can auto switch to more capable models when needed.

> What does cursor have?

users

People keep saying this but I have yet to find an integrated system that has good tab completion, cheap coding models and works well in an IDE. There are a number of options out there, none of them have captured much market share.

I dont think so. I strongly prefer cursor over claude code and the composer model is basically unlimited and free also being super fast.

Of all the ai companies out there, anthropic and cursor are the two id invest in.

The have customers actually willing to use and pay for their service.

In a world where even Microsoft is needing to use AWS for capacity beyond Azure, xAI's utilization of their data centers has been so low that they are renting them out to competitors instead.

Nobody wants Grok. If you aren't using GPT-5 or Claude, you are probably using an open Chinese model like Qwen hosted by some provider.

I would expect Cursor to be forced to use the Grok Code models in short order. We'll see how people feel about "Mecha Hitler" writing their code.

Customers, talent, training data, an increasingly competitive coding model and now a fuckton of compute.

So, you know. Couple of things.

Specially given that coding turns out to not be all that complicated, in the grand scheme of AI things: I don't think it's going take much more advances at the frontier before code writing will be as good as it need to be. At that point Composer (their model) catches up, what, 6 month later and they good.

Look at it the other way: What did Musk get last Friday? $75B from the SpaceX IPO.

It's almost like giving a toddler $100 in the toy department and seeing what happens next.

Musk bought Cursor for its users (lots of devs still use it), as part of yet another attempt at catching up after building Grok and buying OpenAI failed.

Likely, Cursor becomes Grok Desktop or whatever, and eventually uses xAI's coding model if they can make a competitive one.