SpaceX officially closed its Cursor acquisition today, and the first thing I did was open the pricing page to see whether anything had moved yet. Nothing had. Give it two quarters.

That’s the third mainstream AI dev tool to change hands this cycle. I’ve stopped reacting to the announcements themselves, because the announcement is never the part that costs you anything. The cost shows up later, quietly, in a changed default or a plan tier that got renamed while you weren’t looking.

What actually resets when a tool gets bought

A roadmap. A pricing page. A privacy policy you already read once and agreed to, which is now a different document with the same URL.

The sublet problem

Every AI tool you don’t own the keys to is a sublet. You’re paying someone who is themselves paying someone else, and when the lease above you gets sold, your terms change without anyone asking you.

Look at what else happened in the last couple of weeks. Anthropic started rolling out watermarking on generated output. Google quietly changed its rules on AI watermark removal, which is the kind of policy shift that sounds like housekeeping until you realize a workflow somebody built in March now behaves differently in August. None of those were acquisitions. They were just owners doing owner things. And that’s the part I think people underweight when they evaluate a tool: you’re not just buying the current feature set, you’re buying whatever the company decides the feature set should be after its next board meeting, its next funding round, or its next acquirer’s integration plan.

I don’t think any of this is scandalous. Companies get sold. Policies get updated. But if your entire working setup routes through one vendor’s servers, one vendor’s model access, and one vendor’s terms, then you’ve concentrated a surprising amount of your daily productivity into a decision you have zero input on. And the switching cost is never just the subscription. It’s the muscle memory, the saved prompts, the half-configured integrations, the two weeks where you’re slower because your hands don’t know the new shortcuts.

We wrote about the adjacent version of this problem when everyone was migrating from ChatGPT to Claude and calling it independence, in You Switched from ChatGPT to Claude. You’re Still Locked In. Moving between two landlords isn’t the same as holding the deed.

The layer nobody can buy

Your Chrome is already logged into everything. Gmail, Salesforce, Linear, the internal admin panel with the ugly table, the vendor portal that has never had an API and never will. That session state is yours. It sits on your machine. No acquisition touches it.

That’s the whole reason Dassi runs as a Chrome side panel instead of a cloud service with its own browser fleet. It works in the tab you’re already authenticated in, using whatever model key you point it at. So when a vendor upstream gets acquired, or reprices, or decides your tier no longer includes the good model, the change lands on your API bill rather than on your workflow.

BYOK is the boring half of that and the important half. Bring your own key means the relationship is between you and the model provider directly, with nothing in the middle deciding what you’re allowed to do this month. If Anthropic ships something I want, I switch the key. If Gemini gets cheaper for bulk extraction work, I switch the key. Dassi doesn’t care, because it was never the thing doing the thinking. It’s the thing doing the clicking. We went further into why that separation matters in AI Data Mining Makes BYOK Essential.

Cursor will probably be fine

Honestly, I expect Cursor under SpaceX to keep shipping. The team is good, the product is good, and acquisitions don’t automatically ruin things no matter how much the internet wants them to.

But “probably fine” is a forecast, not a guarantee, and it’s a forecast about a company whose incentives just changed in ways nobody outside the deal fully understands yet. I’d rather have a setup where I don’t need the forecast to be right. Where the execution layer lives in software I installed, running against a key I bought, driving a browser session I logged into myself.

There’s something a little funny about the fact that the most acquisition-proof piece of infrastructure in my whole stack is a browser tab. Not the model. Not the IDE. Not the agent framework with the clever name. Just Chrome, sitting there, still logged in, indifferent to whoever bought what this week.

Anyway. Somebody’s getting acquired next month too, and I’d bet money the roadmap post uses the word “accelerate.”