Forbes: Cursor Fights for AI Programming Dominance 【1】"State of War" On January 5, Cursor's employees returned to the office after the holidays, greeted by an all-hands meeting with a presentation titled "State of War." During the holiday break, some employees tested Anthropic's newly released model Opus 4.5 and reached a disturbing conclusion: the model's programming capabilities have become so advanced that developers no longer need to review output code line by line. Developers no longer need to collaborate with the AI assistant in Cursor's code editor to refine code; instead, they can issue high-level commands directly to autonomous agents and receive complete functional modules—sometimes even finished products. This poses a significant problem for Cursor. Cursor's foundation is built on a completely different premise. CEO Michael Truell described it in a 2024 interview with Forbes as a "Google Docs for programmers"—an editor for humans and AI to collaboratively refine code. But if AI no longer requires human collaborators, what is the purpose of the editor? If writing and modifying code line by line is no longer central to a programmer's workflow, the core product logic of Cursor suddenly becomes a question mark. At that all-hands meeting, Cursor's management warned that the next few months would be turbulent. Projects might be cut, and priorities could be reshuffled. The company's new mission was marked as "P0 #1" (P0, meaning the highest priority task): "Build the best programming model." Not the best shell product, but the best model. Whether this represents a shift in atmosphere or not, internally at Cursor, it feels more like a reckoning. 【2】Growth and Anxiety Coexist This is precisely why the current situation is so shocking. Just a short while ago, Cursor seemed almost unstoppable. The company's annualized revenue at the beginning of 2025 was about $100 million, and by November, it had surpassed $1 billion. The latest funding round pushed the company's valuation to nearly $30 billion, with all four co-founders becoming billionaires, and Cursor ranking among the top 20 most valuable private companies globally. But in the rapidly changing world of AI, momentum can appear and disappear overnight. By February, after Anthropic released a more powerful new version of Opus, posts from startup founders began to flood X (formerly Twitter), claiming their teams had abandoned Cursor, believing that model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the programming tools layer themselves. "The companies I mentioned... most people's view is that Cursor is already outdated today." — Jerry Murdock, co-founder of Insight Partners and former executive director, 20VC podcast But the data tells a different story. According to insiders, Cursor's annualized revenue has surpassed $2 billion, doubling in three months. Data from corporate credit card companies Ramp and Brex also shows revenue continued to grow into February, although Ramp noted that Cursor's penetration in corporate AI product procurement is slightly declining. Whether the strong growth of Claude Code will ultimately impact Cursor's growth remains unclear. Internally, Cursor's management is well aware that the future of software development does not lie in writing code line by line. In response, they have been building R&D capabilities, trying to get ahead in the race to release the best programming model by publishing research results and leveraging vast proprietary data, aiming to stay ahead of Anthropic and OpenAI. Meanwhile, they have begun prioritizing large enterprise client contracts, as enterprise contracts are more stable than individual subscriptions....