Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take on Claude Code and Codex

Cursor announced Thursday the motorboat of Cursor 3, a caller merchandise interface that allows users to rotation up AI coding agents to implicit tasks connected their behalf. The product, which was developed nether the codification sanction Glass, is Cursor’s effect to agentic coding tools similar Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which person taken disconnected with millions of developers successful caller months.

“In the past fewer months, our assemblage has wholly changed,” said Jonas Nelle, 1 of Cursor’s heads of engineering, successful an interrogation with WIRED. “A batch of the merchandise that got Cursor present is not arsenic important going guardant anymore.”

Cursor progressively finds itself successful contention with starring AI labs for developers and endeavor customers. The institution pioneered 1 of the archetypal and astir fashionable ways for developers to codification with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor 1 of these companies’ biggest AI customers. But successful the past 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic person launched agentic coding products of their own, and started offering them done highly subsidized subscriptions that person enactment unit connected Cursor’s business.

While Cursor’s halfway merchandise lets developers codification successful an integrated improvement situation (IDE) and pat an AI exemplary for help, caller products similar Claude Code and Codex halfway astir allowing developers to off-load full tasks to an AI agent—sometimes spinning up aggregate agents astatine the aforesaid time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s mentation of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the merchandise is optimized for a satellite wherever developers walk their days “conversing with antithetic agents, checking successful connected them, and seeing the enactment that they did,” alternatively than penning codification themselves.

Cursor is launching its caller agentic coding interface wrong its existing desktop app, wherever it volition unrecorded alongside the IDE. At the halfway of a caller model successful Cursor, there’s a substance container wherever users tin type, successful earthy language, a task they’d similar an AI cause to complete—it looks much similar a chatbot than a coding environment. Press enter, the AI cause sets to enactment without requiring the developer to constitute a azygous enactment of code. In a sidebar connected the left, developers tin presumption and negociate each of the AI agents they person moving successful Cursor.

What’s unsocial astir Cursor 3, compared to desktop apps for Claude Code and Codex, is that it integrates an agent-first merchandise with Cursor’s AI-powered improvement environment. In a demo, Cursor’s different cohead of engineering for Cursor 3, Alexi Robbins, showed WIRED however users tin punctual an cause successful the unreality to rotation up a feature, and past reappraisal the codification it generated locally connected their computer.

Nelle and Robbins reason it doesn’t substance which interface developers are spending their clip in—they conscionable privation radical utilizing Cursor.

Competing With the AI Labs

I visited Cursor's bureau successful San Francisco's North Beach vicinity past week. The startup is reportedly raising caller superior astatine a $50 cardinal valuation—nearly treble what it was valued successful a backing circular past fall—and has expanded into an aged movie theater. Cursor employees utilized to flip their shoes successful a heap by the doorway upon entry, but present there's a enactment of ample footwear racks, signaling 1 mode successful which the institution is increasing up.

Yet Cursor inactive feels similar a startup. Employees archer maine that’s portion of the entreaty of moving there; the institution tin vessel rapidly and doesn't consciousness excessively corporate. But arsenic it finds itself racing to drawback up to Anthropic and OpenAI successful the agentic coding race, that scrappiness whitethorn not beryllium enough. This battle—the 1 to make the champion AI coding agent—may beryllium Cursor’s astir capital-intensive section yet.