The New Enterprise Battle Over Who Owns the Model

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, the month of model continues and businesses might want to pay attention to this new open weight model introduced yesterday.
Before that in the headlines, Apple hunting for a chip acquisition, Microsoft competing with OpenAI and Anthropic, and Cursor also getting deeper into the model game. AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Today is one of those days where the headlines part of the episode actually has a pretty coherent theme with the main episode. Because friends, we are in our model era. The information recently reported on an all hands meeting that Cursor held back in May, where CEO Michael Trull laid out the future direction for the company. The meeting took place a couple of weeks after the SpaceX deal was announced, which at the time was a compute and training partnership with an acquisition option, although even then it seemed pretty likely that the deal would be finalized after the SpaceX IPO. Trull told staff that Cursor would aim to become a top tier model developer in their own right, not exclusively limited to AI coding. Indeed, in the short term, he aimed to produce a state of the art model by the end of the year, and by 2027, he wanted to accrue a significant compute advantage and actually push the frontier forward. Trull also apparently acknowledged some unease among staff about the SpaceX acquisition. He described Cursor as being in the midst of rapid change and significant growth, and promised to provide more clarity around the deal as it developed. Trull also explained that SpaceX wanted to leverage Cursor's brand, existing enterprise relationships, and larger go-to-market team. Now, subsequent to this, we've seen the release of the first SpaceX AI model trained in partnership with Cursor in Grok 4.5. And holding aside recent controversy around data retention, the actual model itself has been well-received and seems competitive, especially as we get into more advanced model architectures, where companies are pairing state-of-the-art and frontier with slightly less performant but slightly more affordable models. Behind the scenes, Cursor is also rumored to be working on a competitor to Claude Cowork, which would be their first big expansion beyond coding. Now, it's very clear that Elon and SpaceX AI have big plans for this integration. And for those who have been paying attention, this is more evolution than revolution, given that Cursor had already decided as early as the end of last year that the model development game was going to have to be a game they played. Still, we have now confirmation that all of the signals we're seeing from outside are what they're talking about inside. And I think as consumers, you got to think that this just means more quality options for us. So I'm excited to see what they do.
Now, speaking of SpaceX on the market side, the company's stock dipped below its IPO price for the first time. On Wednesday, SpaceX traded down to $133, breaking through the $135 IPO price for the first time. It did recover very slightly to close the day at $135.27, but the stock is now down 33% from its all-time high and Elon Musk has lost his trillionaire status. Musk, of course, doesn't seem all that concerned, focusing instead on the next Starship launch. Meanwhile, there are plenty of bears pointing out that insider lockups won't even start for another month. The more significant implications of this than anything happening in the SpaceX world may be actually around what it means for other AI companies looking to IPO. Last we had heard, OpenAI were increasingly inclined to wait until next year for their IPO plans. As of late June, advisors were reportedly telling Sam Altman that they thought that they were unlikely to achieve his target of a trillion-dollar market cap. Anthropic, on the other hand, seemed to still be on track for an IPO in the fall. Bloomberg reports that Anthropic has appointed investment banks to lead the offering and are setting meetings with investors over the coming weeks. Anthropic had been targeting an IPO as early as September or October, which could still be possible. The company has also added a couple billion dollars in a revolving credit facility, sending all the signals that they are in fact gearing up for a run at the public markets. Still, it feels like the next few weeks are going to be an extremely important period, as Anthropic will be meeting with public investors to test the waters and see whether an IPO is viable at this time.