SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion in Record Deal
SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a deal valued at $60 billion, structured as a complete stock exchange. The company stated that this acquisition aims to bolster its capabilities in response to competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI, following its merger with Elon Musk's AI subsidiary, xAI.
Cursor CEO Michael Truel said, "We are excited to collaborate with the SpaceX team to expand our AI capabilities." Cursor is a coding tool used by 67% of Fortune 500 companies, generating an annual recurring revenue of $4 billion, with corporate sales tripling in the first quarter of this year. The two companies are currently training a joint AI model using xAI's Colossus supercomputing infrastructure, which will soon be integrated into Cursor and Grok Build. The acquisition is expected to be finalized in the third quarter, pending regulatory approval.
ChatGPT's Market Share Falls Below 50% as Gemini and Claude Gain Ground
According to Sensor Tower's "2026 AI Status Report," ChatGPT's global market share in the AI assistant sector dropped to 46.4% as of May, marking its first decline below 50% since its launch in November 2022. Gemini holds a 27.7% share, while Claude accounts for 10.3%. In terms of absolute user numbers, ChatGPT remains the leader with 1.1 billion monthly active users, followed by Gemini with 662 million and Claude with 245 million.
Claude's growth has been particularly notable, with monthly users increasing from 60.2 million in December 2025 to 245 million in May 2026, nearly a fourfold rise in just five months. In the U.S., its market share surged from 4.4% to 14%. Following OpenAI's contract with the Department of Defense in February, reports of ChatGPT deletions surged, coinciding with a spike in Claude downloads. Additionally, OpenAI began displaying ads to 17% of its daily active users in May, contributing to user attrition.
Google's Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI After Leading Gemini Development
Noam Shazeer, Google's engineering vice president and co-lead of the Gemini AI model, has announced his move to OpenAI. Shazeer is a co-author of the influential 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which laid the groundwork for nearly all large language models today. He will oversee AI architecture research at OpenAI, where CEO Sam Altman publicly welcomed him, stating, "I have wanted to work with Noam since the early days of OpenAI." Google previously agreed to pay approximately $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back by August 2024 under a character AI technology licensing agreement, making his transition to OpenAI a significant loss for Google.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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