i'll reiterate since it's buried in this longpost: how much longer do you *really* think OpenAI and Anthropic will continue to serve their raw frontier models through publicly accessible APIs? that was always a revenue and data bootstrap. it's ending within the next two years.

"who cares if Cursor used Kimi 2.5 as a base, starting with a commoditized pretrained model was always the right move anyway"

nah, sorry, what it proves is Cursor is still fundamentally reliant on frontier labs. Kimi 2.5 is only as capable as it is because it's a distill of Opus 4.5. the only open model that ever showed it was capable of trading blows w the frontier was deep seek, and it really seems that moment has passed.

the question was whether Cursor could really break the dependency chain and start building improvements based entirely on their own expertise and data. and Composer 2 shows that they *can't*, that they need the general model quality and intelligence from 4.5 to get anywhere, and that really what they're doing is laundering culpability through Chinese labs so they don't have to get their hands dirty doing distillation themselves.

when Opus 5 and GPT 6 are significantly more capable along many dimensions, more RL with coding rollouts aren't going to be enough to save Composer 3, they'll either need to have caught up with whatever the frontier labs are doing internally, which right now we have pretty strong evidence they just don't have the research capacity for or... wait for another distill.

and how much longer do you *really* think OpenAI and Anthropic will continue to serve their frontier models through publicly accessible APIs? that was always a revenue and data bootstrap. it's ending within the next two years.

here's some further nearterm reasons why. the longer term reason: once they have real superhuman RSI, it would be both incredibly unsafe and an insane loss of power to hand that to others at any price.

- labs already have and will continue to build application layers on top of their own models, eg claude code and codex
- they have strongly signaled that they're going to just keep doing this in many other verticals, likely folding in capabilities into their "everything apps" (claude cowork etc, openai's upcoming consolidated app), allowing them to do shit like... law, and bio research
- enterprise users are very very happy to pay large sums to use these specific apps because they do huge amounts of very valuable work, they don't need direct API access for these, and going forward as the labs get more into harness engineering etc the direct API access will just be less useful. people pay to solve problems!
- increasingly exposing the newest models in public APIs just allows companies to 1. trivially build and maintain competitors to frontier labs and 2. distill rollouts at scale
- as models become significantly more capable the labs need more and more control over what people are doing with them
- so if their revenue mostly comes from first party non api offerings, and exposing the APIs just leads to competition + distillation + safety concerns... they'll just stop adding their best models to the API
- openai has already effectively experimented with this with periods of the -codex suffixed models only being usable through codex!