The Power of Defaults: Why OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Are Courting App Developers

The debate around whether it’s better to be an AI-powered app that millions of people use, like Cursor, or an AI model like Claude that powers such apps is getting interesting.

While Cursor and other customers of AI models are hurting as OpenAI and Anthropic mostly hold model prices steady rather than cutting them—as they have been doing for the past couple of years (see my colleague Aaron’s story this morning), the app makers are also carrying more sway than before.

How else can one explain why Michael Truell, the CEO of the firm that owns Cursor, appeared on OpenAI’s GPT-5 launch livestream to say that his coding app would be switching the default model it uses to GPT-5 from Anthropic's Claude? 

To be fair, Truell has hundreds of millions of reasons to make the switch, given that Anthropic is trying to eat Cursor’s lunch through its own coding service. But we wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI sweetened the deal by giving him a discounted rate.