Last year, OpenAI was seriously considering buying Anysphere, the brains behind the popular AI coding tool, Cursor. But they eventually shifted their attention to a competitor, Windsurf. According to insiders, OpenAI made the first move with Anysphere, known for its cutting-edge coding application, Cursor. Even as Cursor’s popularity soared and talks were rekindled this year, the discussions didn’t really take off. Neither OpenAI nor Anysphere has commented on these developments.
Meanwhile, Anysphere is in talks with investors, aiming for a valuation that’s nearing $10 billion. On the other hand, OpenAI is reportedly eyeing Windsurf for a potential acquisition valued at about $3 billion, which could be its largest deal yet. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, took to social media platform X to share exciting news about new reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, which are particularly strong in coding tasks, along with the new Codex CLI product.
Cursor has been gaining momentum as a desktop app that offers coding help through Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. Its popularity got a boost when Microsoft supported the Sonnet model in GitHub Copilot, leading some developers to prefer Cursor over GitHub Copilot. The AI industry’s ongoing investment in data centers packed with Nvidia GPUs highlights the increasing use of large language models in fields like sales and customer service.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy introduced the idea of “vibe coding,” which reflects the growing trend of using AI for code generation. There’s a lot of excitement around Cursor and similar tools like Bolt, Replit, and Vercel, with over a million daily users reported back in March. Anysphere, which started in 2022 and is already pulling in over $100 million in recurring revenue, has caught the attention of big names like Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund. Cursor operates on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor.
