OpenAI cuts off Cursor because of who bought it
OpenAI told SpaceX on 28 August that it intends to wind down the contract supplying OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of 12 November 2026. The company said it gave the maximum notice its contract allows, and that it will not provide future models to Cursor at all. Cursor is now owned by SpaceX, and the change of control is what opened a limited cancellation window in the custom agreement. The stated reason for using it is trust: OpenAI says it “cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service,” citing Twitter’s breach of an OpenAI contract after Musk acquired it and Musk’s sworn admission earlier this year that xAI had violated OpenAI’s terms. It also points to a “new level of accountability” around its forthcoming model, Astra — so a supplier is terminating partly because of what its next model can do. The two companies had worked together for nearly four years. (OpenAI)
For anyone running AI tooling inside a European business, the mechanism matters more than the feud. A model supplier terminated access to a developer tool over a decision the tool’s users had no part in, and the affected customers get about eleven weeks. Contracts for frontier models routinely carry change-of-control clauses and terms-of-service discretion, and the supplier reads them, not you. The practical response is not to pick a side but to know, for each model you depend on, who can cut it off and on what notice — and to keep the integration portable enough that swapping the endpoint is a config change rather than a rebuild.
Lidl’s owner puts €5.6bn into its own data centre
Schwarz Group — the German retail group behind Lidl and Kaufland — and the state government of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have agreed to build a “digital hub” in northeastern Germany. Schwarz will invest €5.6bn ($6.52bn) in a 240MW data centre near Rostock by 2033, with a path to 1GW by 2045. The site has a possible 380kV grid connection, a regional supply weighted towards onshore and offshore wind, a cool enough climate for free cooling, and a letter of intent with Rostock’s municipal utilities to reuse waste heat. Crucially, Schwarz intends to use the capacity itself rather than let it as colocation. (DCD)
The framing was unusually blunt for a corporate announcement. Schwarz partner Gerd Chrzanowski: “Digital sovereignty is not achieved through appeals or speeches. It is achieved through action, reliable infrastructure, and practical applications.” Minister-President Manuela Schwesig said the state’s goal is “to become less dependent on foreign providers of data centers and cloud and AI applications.” Schwarz’s cloud arm, StackIT, was one of four providers picked for the European Commission’s €180m sovereign cloud tender earlier this year, so this is a retailer with an existing sovereign-cloud business buying itself another decade of headroom. Most European enterprises will never build 240MW of their own. The signal is that the ones with the balance sheet to do it have stopped treating the question as theoretical.
A distilled model gives up 5.6 points and costs 17x less
Together AI published a head-to-head of GLM-5.3 against its distilled sibling GLM-5.3 Flash on DeepSWE v1.1 — 113 software-engineering tasks, four trials per configuration, both at maximum effort. The full model scored 69.0% ± 2.7 pass@1 at $3.99 per rollout; Flash scored 63.4% ± 4.1 at $0.24. That is 17 times cheaper: 264 solved tasks per $100 against 17. At pass@4 the gap narrows to 2.6 points (87.6% versus 85.0%), and none of the 48 tasks the full model solved on all four attempts became unsolvable for Flash. (Together AI)
What distillation cost here was consistency, not capability — Flash knows how to solve the same problems and simply does so less reliably. It is also less careful: it breaks an already-passing baseline test in 6.9% of rollouts against 4.4% for the full model, which is the number to watch if the agent is touching a real codebase. Together’s own cascade — try Flash, escalate what it fails — lands at 80.9% for $1.70 a task. The evaluation is the vendor’s own, so treat the exact figures as indicative. The shape of the result is the useful part: on a large slice of routine work the cheap model is the correct answer, and the expensive model earns its price on the tail.
Quick Hits
- Anthropic’s models are proposing alignment fixes that beat human researchers’ first drafts — In work published 28 August, Claude autonomously proposed, trained and tested mitigations for 10 categories of alignment failure, closing 26–96% of the measured safety gap. On deception in Gemma-2-2B it closed 85% of the gap on average against 20% for six experienced human safety researchers working under the same rules — though Anthropic notes the humans could not iterate on their submissions, so it does not treat this as a direct comparison. The harness is open-sourced. (Anthropic)
- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over training data — The publishers, joined by others, filed in the Northern District of California against Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally, alleging a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works,” including pirated books containing lyrics and sheet music. Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and will defend itself. (TechCrunch)
- Italy’s data centre pipeline is 95GW on paper and 15 projects in practice — Grid operator Terna has received 531 connection requests totalling 95.38GW, up from 31.28GW in 2024, with 300 arriving in the past eight months. Per Fortune Italia only about 15 are close to final approval, and per Il Sole 24 ORE roughly a tenth came from actual data centre operators. Treat announced European capacity as a queue, not a supply. (DCD)
- Proton lost Frankfurt to a cooling failure it had already identified — Services went down after what CEO Andy Yen called an “unprecedented total cooling failure” shortly after midnight on 27 August; temperatures climbed from 30°C to 60°C in about 20 minutes and automatic failover did not trigger because the site was only partially dead. Yen said the failure mode was known but mitigations had not been prioritised because the scenario was judged extremely unlikely, and conceded the response missed Proton’s SLA. Sovereign and resilient are separate properties, and you have to buy both. (DCD)
- A UK moratorium call gets answered with a sovereignty argument — Green Party leader Zack Polanski called on 28 August for a halt to new UK data centre approvals after the driest July on record. A government spokesperson rejected it, saying a pause would send investment abroad “while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defense data” — data sovereignty deployed to rebut an environmental objection. ()