Comment by rgbrenner
3 hours ago
Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46
So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models.
This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider.
It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.
Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use.
That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling.
>"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
Cursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access...
And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi...
So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
Anthropic seems to have no issues: https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20
> if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything
It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.
i'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer
>Musk admitted to distilling their models.
what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
Well, they will stop releasing their latest models, and just attempt to eat all software themselves.
Otherwise, it will be competitors distilling, and the government getting upset.
It's hard for me to see a different future.
And, this really sucks.
If this thesis is true, I wonder what the final YC batch number might be.
Distilling merely saves an expensive part of the process: hundreds of millions. So even if distilling wasn't a thing, what justifies trillions ?
running on someone else's server, you're basically giving them your weights.