Curator explodes with explosive news: once accounted for half of Anthropic’s revenue

Who would have thought that feeding half of Anthropic’s life would be its biggest rival.

Just yesterday, Business Insider once again exploded with sensational news and revealed a magical detail: Cursor contributed up to 40% to 50% of Anthropic’s revenue during its early and craziest days!

A startup tool company, with its explosive growth, has fed half of the underlying model suppliers in reverse.

This leverage effect, epic level, directly fills up.

But at the same time that the cursor was continuously sending money, Anthropic quietly held back a big one – Claude Code.

As soon as it went online, it directly stabbed this biggest financial owner.

Strange symbiosis, you eat my meat, I drink your blood
Cursor employees describe their relationship with Anthropic in one word: Weird – eerie.

The cursor cannot play without Anthropic’s model. No matter how user-friendly its editor is, the underlying intelligence is entirely driven by Claude.

On the other hand, Anthropic cannot do without cursor – the more cursor users skyrocket, the more exaggerated the API bills paid to Anthropic.

During peak periods, the cursor family contributed nearly half of Anthropic’s revenue.

We made a lot of money for Anthropic, “an employee said,” but at the same time, Anthropic is holding a competitor that can kill us. ”

This is the most classic platform hijacking: you can’t live without my model, and I can’t bear to part with your bill.

Seemingly a win-win situation, but in reality, there is a turbulent undercurrent – because suppliers can turn against each other at any time.

‘White Lies’: What about a good research project?
Prior to the official launch of Claude Code, Anthropic executives privately briefed the Cursor leadership repeatedly: Don’t worry, this is just a ‘research effort’, not a serious commercial product.

The cursor has received the letter.

In May 2025, Claude Code was officially launched.

Six months later, the annualized revenue exceeded 1 billion US dollars. By February 2026, it will soar directly to $2.5 billion – about $500 million higher than the $2 billion that cursor had at the time.

The speed is the most violent comeback in the history of developer tools.

Developers have started publicly sharing images: I have withdrawn the cursor and switched to Claude Code.

There is a wave of ‘defection’ on social media.

Someone summarized it very succinctly: Claude Code does more work with fewer tokens, crushes efficiency in complex tasks, and does not require an editor – one terminal is enough.

The promised ‘research project’ turned into a $2.5 billion killer.

This knife pierced the most painful part of the cursor.

Lesson from the Past: Windsurf’s Interrupted Supply Alert
If Claude Code’s outburst made Cursor uneasy, then Anthropic’s blow to Windsurf was what truly scared them.

In June 2025, OpenAI announced the acquisition of AI programming tool Windsurf for $3 billion.

As soon as the news came out, Anthropic reacted faster than anyone else – almost at the same time, it directly cut off Windsurf’s API access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and 3.7 Sonnet.

Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan publicly expressed willingness to pay in full, but Anthropic simply did not accept this statement.

Co founder Jared Kaplan put it bluntly: It’s too strange to sell Claude to OpenAI.

How ruthless is this move?

Windsurf’s user experience plummeted overnight, forcing them to urgently seek alternative solutions.

This vivid case proves one thing: when you entrust your life to someone else’s API, they can easily unplug it with just one click.

The Cursor executive felt a chill in his back when he saw it. Who can guarantee that the next one to be cut off will not be themselves?

Emergency staff meeting: self-developed model
On January 5, 2026, 25-year-old Cursor CEO Michael Truell convened a staff meeting. An employee described the meeting in one word: emergency.

At the meeting, Truell made it clear: we must ensure that we are not left behind. Cancel all unnecessary meetings, you may be temporarily transferred to another group this week, everyone needs to be flexible and react quickly.

The core resolution is only one: to develop our own model and take our lives back into our own hands.

After the meeting, the cursor launched a dual pronged attack: on one hand, it conducted a comprehensive pricing comparison between Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, and reassured its largest customers; While relentlessly pursuing the self-developed code model Composer.

Composer is built on top of Kimi. By the release of Composer 2.5 in May, Cursor stated that over 85% of the work was their own, with only a small portion being the underlying open-source model.

The engineer’s feedback is’ crazy positive ‘- cheap and fast. In the current situation where token costs are tight, this is particularly valuable.

More importantly, the self-developed model enabled Cursor to start breaking free from that fatal dependency relationship.

Bet on Musk: Get 10 billion without buying
The self-developed model solves the soul problem, but the computing power gap is still fatal.

This spring, Truell approached Musk.

On April 21st, he announced a partnership with SpaceX and agreed to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion later this year.

According to SpaceX’s S-1 listing documents, if either party reneges, SpaceX will pay a termination fee of $1.5 billion plus $8.5 billion in free computing power – a total of $10 billion in “breakup fees”.

This 25-year-old MIT graduate, who has had zero salary for many years, submitted a programming test paper in 10 minutes at the age of 18, and won a $10000 prize for programming games at the age of 15, is transforming from an editor company to a contender for models and computing power with Cursor.

Currently, Cursor’s annualized revenue has reached $4 billion, with 700 employees serving 64% of the Fortune 500.

This is indeed a bit crazy, “Truell said.” We are well aware of how special and unprecedented this is

Conclusion
Looking back at this timeline, we can see how power has gradually changed hands.

A year ago, cursor was still the largest investor on Anthropic’s ledger.

At that time, Anthropic needed a cursor, far more than cursor thought.

But Claude Code changed everything. When Anthropic’s own programming tools reach an annualized revenue of $2.5 billion, it no longer needs to rely on Cursors to fill in reports.

And Cursor was also forced to develop its own Composer and bind it to SpaceX’s computing power, cutting off every lifeline that once extended to Anthropic one by one.

The two companies that once fed each other are now competing head-on on the same track.

The battle of AI programming is no longer about ‘whose editor is better to use’.

It has been upgraded to a colder proposition – who holds the three gates of destiny of models, computing power, and developer access.