Elon Musk is stepping up efforts to compete with AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI.
Musk’s AI startup xAI has held talks in recent weeks with Mistral and AI coding startup Cursor about a potential three-way partnership, according to people familiar with the matter. Mistral is a French AI startup founded in 2023 that positions itself as an independent alternative to Frontier Labs in the US.
SpaceX, which owns xAI, this week announced a deal with Cursor that gives SpaceX an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. Business Insider reported last week that Cursor is training its AI models on xAI’s infrastructure.
Musk has been pushing for more partnerships with xAI in an effort to overtake Anthropic and OpenAI, which have recently moved ahead with AI coding services and AI agents.
Musk envisions closer AI collaboration with Mistral and Cursor to counter rivals like Anthropic, people told Business Insider. Mistral co-founder Devendra Chaplot joined xAI last month from AI startup Thinking Machines Lab. He is currently leading pre-training at xAI.
Representatives for xAI, Cursor, and Mistral did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Musk’s AI company launched the Grok chatbot in 2023 and has been working to expand its infrastructure and improve model performance. Rapidly established one of the largest data center footprints in the AI race. Last year, xAI announced it had about 200,000 Nvidia graphics processing units, and Musk said it plans to expand to 1 million GPUs.
Musk has made several changes to xAI’s executive ranks over the past few months. Since late last year, he has repeatedly raised concerns with technologists about Anthropic’s lead in the AI race, the people said. Michael Nichols, a SpaceX executive and president of xAI, said earlier this month that the company is “clearly behind” its competitors and needs to take action to catch up.
Musk has publicly criticized Anthropic, describing the company’s AI models as “human-hating and evil.” humanity is has emerged over the past year as a major contender in the AI race, especially when it comes to AI coding tools. In January, Anthropic blocked xAI from accessing its Claude AI models through its Cursor coding tool.
Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, is also in the midst of suing OpenAI, accusing the company of straying from its original nonprofit mission. Musk is positioning xAI as an alternative to what he calls “woke” AI.
Correction: April 22, 2026 — A previous version of this article incorrectly described Cursor as a French company.
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