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Cursor Built Its New Coding Model on a Chinese AI and Did Not Tell Anyone

Cursor launched a new coding model this week called Composer 2, describing it as offering frontier-level coding intelligence. Within hours, someone on X had spotted something in the code that told a different story. The model appeared to be built on top of Kimi K2.5, an open source model from Moonshot AI, a Chinese company backed by Alibaba. Cursor had not mentioned any of this in its launch announcement.

The person who spotted it was blunt about it online, pointing to what looked like an unrenamed model ID as evidence. The discovery spread quickly, partly because of the gap between the way Cursor had presented the model and what was actually inside it.

To be clear, what Cursor did was not illegal or even technically against the rules. Kimi K2.5 is open source and available for commercial use. Cursor's VP of developer education Lee Robinson acknowledged the open source base publicly and explained that only about a quarter of the compute used in the final model came from Kimi, with the rest coming from Cursor's own training work. He argued that this makes Composer 2's performance meaningfully different from the base model it started with. Moonshot AI itself posted on X confirming the use of Kimi was part of an authorised commercial partnership and said it was proud to see the model used this way.

But the issue was not really about licensing. It was about transparency. Cursor is a well-funded American startup valued at $29.3 billion, reportedly crossing $2 billion in annualised revenue, and operating in a space where trust from developers matters enormously. Quietly building on a Chinese model without disclosing it, at a time when the US and China AI rivalry is one of the most talked-about dynamics in the industry, was always going to raise eyebrows when it came out.

Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger acknowledged it was a mistake not to mention the Kimi base from the start and said the company would handle it differently next time.