[yorwba]

They're offering a model based on Kimi K2.5 for $0.50/M input and $2.50/M output while the cheapest third-party provider on OpenRouter charges $0.40/M input and $1.90/M output https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2.5 Those third-party providers have little incentive to subsidize their customers, so Cursor probably has a margin >20% on their inference cost.

The real money furnace is the training, not just of models that get released, but also experimental training runs that fail to move benchmarks and are quietly thrown away. E.g. Cursor claim that 85% of the compute for Composer 2.5 comes from additional training on top of Kimi K2.5, where I'm not sure how they determined that, but it can't have been cheap. Then they say "Together with SpaceXAI, we're training a significantly larger model from scratch, using 10x more total compute."

So yes, they're probably attempting to replicate the Anthropic playbook of paying a large upfront cost for a very good model, and then rapidly acquiring paying customers, hoping that the inference margin will be enough to cover the training cost.