Latest news with #Anysphere
WIRED
6 hours ago
- Business
- WIRED
Cursor's New Bugbot Is Designed to Save Vibe Coders From Themselves
Jul 24, 2025 11:00 AM One of the most popular platforms for AI-assisted programming says the next era of vibe coding is all about supercharging error detection. Photo-Illustration:Anysphere, the company behind the wildly popular vibe coding platform Cursor, is officially launching a new tool that's designed to spot errors in code. The release comes as software developers are expected to code at a higher velocity than ever before due to the rise of AI-assisted coding. The new tool, Bugbot, integrates with Github, a platform where engineers keep their code. When a human or agent introduces changes, Bugbot automatically flags any errors. While that's crucial for human coders, it's particularly useful when using AI coding agents, which work incredibly fast and can introduce errors that are difficult for humans to spot and untangle. Anysphere sees the tool's release as an opportunity to lure more potential vibe-coders onto the Cursor platform. 'Our core product is giving you software engineering super powers, but software engineering goes beyond just writing code in your editor,' Jon Kaplan, an engineer at Anysphere, tells WIRED. 'Bugbot is one of the ways we're now stepping out of the editor.' Last month, Anysphere invited a few thousand engineering teams to beta-test the new tool. Now the company is making it publicly available for $40 per month per person. (Annual customers will get a discount.) That means that existing Cursor customers, who pay between $20 and $200 per year depending on the level of premium features, will now pay an additional $40 for access to Bugbot. A screenshot of how Cursor displays Bugbot to its users. Courtesy of Cursor Anysphere, which was cofounded in 2022 and has around 60 employees, has raised $900 million dollars from marquee firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, alongside angel investors like Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman (who now works at Meta Superintelligence Labs). The startup counts OpenAI, Shopify, Instacart, Midjourney, Discord, and Rippling among its thousands of customers. Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has copped to vibe coding with Cursor. But the competitive landscape for AI-assisted coding platforms is crowded. Startups Windsurf, Replit, and Poolside also sell AI code-generation tools to developers. Cline is a popular open-source alternative. GitHub's Copilot, which was developed in collaboration with OpenAI, is described as a 'pair programmer' that auto-completes code and offers debugging assistance. Most of these code editors are relying on a combination of AI models built by major tech companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. For example, Cursor is built on top of Visual Studio Code, an open-source editor from Microsoft, and Cursor users are generating code by tapping into AI models like Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet. Several developers tell WIRED that they now run Anthropic's coding assistant, Claude Code, alongside Cursor (or instead of it). Since May, Claude Code has offered various debugging options. It can analyze error messages, do step-by-step problem solving, suggest specific changes, and run unit tests in code. All of which might beg the question: How buggy is AI-written code compared to code written by fallible humans? Earlier this week, the AI code-generation tool Replit reportedly went rogue and made changes to a user's code despite the project being in a 'code freeze,' or pause. It ended up deleting the user's entire database. Replit's founder and CEO said on X that the incident was 'unacceptable and should never be possible.' And yet, it was. That's an extreme case, but even small bugs can wreak havoc for coders. Anysphere didn't have a clear answer to the question of whether AI code demands more AI code debugging. Kaplan argues it is 'orthogonal to the fact that people are vibe coding a lot.' Even if all of the code is written by a human, it's still very likely that there will be bugs, he says. Anysphere product engineer Rohan Varma estimates that on professional software teams, as much as 30 to 40 percent of code is being generated by AI. This is in line with estimates shared by other companies; Google, for example, has said that around 30 percent of the company's code is now suggested by AI and reviewed by human developers. Most organizations are still making human engineers responsible for checking code before it's deployed. Notably, one recent randomized control trial with 16 experienced coders suggested that it took them 19 percent longer to complete tasks than when they were not allowed to use AI tools. Bugbot is meant to supercharge that. 'The heads of AI at our larger customers are looking for the next step with Cursor,' Varma says. 'The first step was, 'Let's increase the velocity of our teams, get everyone moving quicker.' Now that they're moving quicker, it's, 'How do we make sure we're not introducing new problems, we're not breaking things?'' He also emphasized that Bugbot is designed to spot specific kinds of bugs—hard-to-catch logic bugs, security issues, and other edge cases. One incident that validated Bugbot for the Anysphere team: A couple months ago, the (human) coders at Anysphere realized that they hadn't gotten any comments from Bugbot on their code for a few hours. Bugbot had gone down. Anysphere engineers began investigating the issue and found the pull request that was responsible for the outage. There in the logs, they saw that Bugbot had commented on the pull request, warning a human engineer that if they made this change it would break the Bugbot service. The tool had correctly predicted its own demise. Ultimately, it was a human that broke it.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Cursor snaps up enterprise startup Koala in challenge to GitHub Copilot
The startup behind the viral AI coding app Cursor is snapping up top talent from AI enterprise startups in a bid to bolster its competition with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot and win over businesses looking to supercharge their employees with AI coding tools. In one recent case, Cursor maker Anysphere struck a deal to acquire the AI-powered customer relationship management (CRM) startup Koala, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. As part of the deal, Cursor will bring on several of Koala's top engineers to build out a dedicated enterprise-readiness team. However, the entire Koala team will not be joining Anysphere, and Cursor does not plan to integrate the startup's core CRM product, a source told TechCrunch. Koala plans to shut down in September, the company said in a blog post published on Friday. The announcement comes just five months after Koala raised a $15 million Series A led by CRV, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Recall Capital and Afore. Koala was nearly four years old, had roughly 30 employees according to LinkedIn, and had worked with clients such as Vercel, Statsig, and Retool. Sources in this story requested anonymity to speak with TechCrunch about private matters. Koala and its founders did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Cursor declined to comment. The Koala deal paints a picture of the two types of AI startups we're seeing in 2025. There's Cursor, a juggernaut of an AI tool that is growing so fast it's starting to encroach on the AI space's largest players, including Microsoft and Anthropic. At the same time, there's a growing number of startups like Koala: B2B AI startups that seemed promising — with a co-founder from Meta and advisors like Jack Altman — but have quickly run out of steam. Cursor is capitalizing on this disparity, leveraging middling AI startups as a means to build out its own enterprise offerings. Anysphere also recently hired the CEO of cybersecurity startup Resourcely, Travis McPeak, to lead the company's security teams, according to The Information. These deals look a lot like Big Tech's reverse-acquihires, such as Meta's recent deal to hire Scale AI's leaders. Much like in Meta and Scale's deal, Cursor can now move quickly to build out new business segments while leaving questionable businesses behind. Cursor hopes that Koala and Resourcely's talent will help it evolve from a personal developer tool that engineers quietly use at work and become an enterprise‑wide platform that companies pay large contracts to access. Most enterprises today that offer employees an AI tool choose Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which works as an AI-powered extension to existing integrated development environments (IDEs) such as VS Code or JetBrains. Cursor, which is a standalone AI-powered IDE, needs to beat out GitHub Copilot to strike deals in many cases, and it often does in head-to-head tests. Still, Microsoft has the upper hand in the enterprise thanks to its long-standing relationships with legacy companies, as well as its large sales, security, and support teams. In the last year, Cursor has decisively built out its go-to-market and sales team — which now contains dozens of employees. Several Cursor employees now spend their days visiting the offices of Fortune 500 companies and showing them how they can integrate Cursor's AI tools into their business, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cursor's enterprise push seems to be gaining traction. Anysphere said it reached $500 million in ARR in June, and now works with more than half of the Fortune 500, including NVIDIA, Uber, and Adobe. A source familiar with the matter says that revenue has since grown, and an increasingly large share of that growth comes from enterprise deals. But as Cursor competes with Microsoft, it also needs to fend off a growing field of threats. The most pressing one is Anthropic, a crucial partner to Anysphere whose Claude Code product has grown rapidly in recent months. Cursor relies heavily on Anthropic's AI models to power its own coding products. (As one of its biggest customers, Cursor is also vital to Anthropic.) At the same time, Google just scooped up the leadership team of Windsurf, a major competitor to Cursor in the AI-powered IDE space. Cognition, the maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquired the rest of Windsurf's team, potentially offering a significant lift to both businesses. It's worth noting that all of these are different types of AI tools, but employers tend to view the products similarly: as AI tools that can improve the productivity of software engineers. These employers might have the right idea. After all, Anthropic, Microsoft, Cursor, and Cognition are all developing AI coding agents which aim to automate workflows completely, which may be where the AI coding space converges. You might ask, why is everyone competing with everyone else to build AI coding products? Coding tools have become one of the first AI products to find 'product market fit' — the elusive goal that makes the ears of venture capitalists perk up. AI coding products are being used daily by millions of software engineers, and they have started to generate real revenue. Put another way, the race isn't just about building the best AI coding tool anymore. It's about who can scale their enterprise operations the fastest while the market is still up for grabs. With the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic all moving fast, Cursor's acquisition strategy may determine whether it joins their ranks or becomes another startup that couldn't scale fast enough.
TechCrunch
6 days ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Cursor snaps up enterprise startup Koala in challenge to GitHub Copilot
The startup behind the viral AI coding app Cursor is snapping up top talent from AI enterprise startups in a bid to bolster its competition with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot and win over businesses looking to supercharge their employees with AI coding tools. In one recent case, Cursor maker Anysphere struck a deal to acquire the AI-powered customer relationship management (CRM) startup Koala, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. As part of the deal, Cursor will bring on several of Koala's top engineers to build out a dedicated enterprise-readiness team. However, the entire Koala team will not be joining Anysphere, and Cursor does not plan to integrate the startup's core CRM product, a source told TechCrunch. Koala plans to shut down in September, the company said in a blog post published on Friday. The announcement comes just five months after Koala raised a $15 million Series A led by CRV, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Recall Capital and Afore. Koala was nearly four years old, had roughly 30 employees according to LinkedIn, and had worked with clients such as Vercel, Statsig, and Retool. Sources in this story requested anonymity to speak with TechCrunch about private matters. Koala and its founders did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Cursor declined to comment. The Koala deal paints a picture of the two types of AI startups we're seeing in 2025. There's Cursor, a juggernaut of an AI tool that is growing so fast it's starting to encroach on the AI space's largest players, including Microsoft and Anthropic. At the same time, there's a growing number of startups like Koala: B2B AI startups that seemed promising — with a co-founder from Meta and advisors like Jack Altman — but have quickly run out of steam. Cursor is capitalizing on this disparity, leveraging middling AI startups as a means to build out its own enterprise offerings. Anysphere also recently hired the CEO of cybersecurity startup Resourcely, Travis McPeak, to lead the company's security teams, according to The Information. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW These deals look a lot like Big Tech's reverse-acquihires, such as Meta's recent deal to hire Scale AI's leaders. Much like in Meta and Scale's deal, Cursor can now move quickly to build out new business segments while leaving questionable businesses behind. Cursor hopes that Koala and Resourcely's talent will help it evolve from a personal developer tool that engineers quietly use at work and become an enterprise‑wide platform that companies pay large contracts to access. Most enterprises today that offer employees an AI tool choose Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which works as an AI-powered extension to existing integrated development environments (IDEs) such as VS Code or JetBrains. Cursor, which is a standalone AI-powered IDE, needs to beat out GitHub Copilot to strike deals in many cases, and it often does in head-to-head tests. Still, Microsoft has the upper hand in the enterprise thanks to its long-standing relationships with legacy companies, as well as its large sales, security, and support teams. In the last year, Cursor has decisively built out its go-to-market and sales team — which now contains dozens of employees. Several Cursor employees now spend their days visiting the offices of Fortune 500 companies and showing them how they can integrate Cursor's AI tools into their business, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cursor's enterprise push seems to be gaining traction. Anysphere said it reached $500 million in ARR in June, and now works with more than half of the Fortune 500, including NVIDIA, Uber, and Adobe. A source familiar with the matter says that revenue has since grown, and an increasingly large share of that growth comes from enterprise deals. But as Cursor competes with Microsoft, it also needs to fend off a growing field of threats. The most pressing one is Anthropic, a crucial partner to Anysphere whose Claude Code product has grown rapidly in recent months. Cursor relies heavily on Anthropic's AI models to power its own coding products. (As one of its biggest customers, Cursor is also vital to Anthropic.) At the same time, Google just scooped up the leadership team of Windsurf, a major competitor to Cursor in the AI-powered IDE space. Cognition, the maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquired the rest of Windsurf's team, potentially offering a significant lift to both businesses. It's worth noting that all of these are different types of AI tools, but employers tend to view the products similarly: as AI tools that can improve the productivity of software engineers. These employers might have the right idea. After all, Anthropic, Microsoft, Cursor, and Cognition are all developing AI coding agents which aim to automate workflows completely, which may be where the AI coding space converges. You might ask, why is everyone competing with everyone else to build AI coding products? Coding tools have become one of the first AI products to find 'product market fit' — the elusive goal that makes the ears of venture capitalists perk up. AI coding products are being used daily by millions of software engineers, and they have started to generate real revenue. Put another way, the race isn't just about building the best AI coding tool anymore. It's about who can scale their enterprise operations the fastest while the market is still up for grabs. With the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic all moving fast, Cursor's acquisition strategy may determine whether it joins their ranks or becomes another startup that couldn't scale fast enough.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Cursor apologizes for unclear pricing changes that upset users
The CEO of Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI-powered coding environment Cursor, apologized Friday for a poorly communicated pricing change to its $20-per-month Pro plan. The changes resulted in some users complaining that they unexpectedly faced additional costs. 'We recognize that we didn't handle this pricing rollout well and we're sorry,' said Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. 'Our communication was not clear enough and came as a surprise to many of you.' Truell is referring to a June 16 update to Cursor's Pro plan. Instead of Pro users getting 500 fast responses on advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and then unlimited responses at a slower rate, the company announced subscribers would now get $20 worth of usage per month, billed at API rates. The new plan allows users to run coding tasks in Cursor with their AI model of choice until they hit the $20 limit, and then users have to purchase additional credits to continue using it. However, Pro users took to social media to file their complaints in the weeks following the announcement. Many users said they ran out of requests in Cursor rather quickly under the new plan, in some cases after just a few prompts when using Anthropic's new Claude models, which are particularly popular for coding. Other users claimed they were unexpectedly charged additional costs, not fully understanding they'd be charged extra if they ran over the $20 usage limit and had not set a spend limit. In the new plan, only Cursor's 'auto mode,' which routes to AI models based on capacity, offers unlimited usage for Pro users. Anysphere says it plans to refund users that were unexpectedly charged, and aims to be more clear about pricing changes moving forward. The company declined TechCrunch's request for comment beyond the blog post. Truell notes in the blog that Anysphere changed Cursor's pricing because 'new models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks' — meaning that some of the latest AI models have become more expensive, spending a lot of time and computational resources to complete complicated, multi-step tasks. Cursor was eating those costs under its old Pro plan, but now, it's passing them along to users. While many AI models have lowered in price, the cutting edge of performance continues to be expensive — in some cases, more pricey than ever. Anthropic's recently launched Claude Opus 4 model is $15 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire 'Lord of The Rings' series) and $75 per million output tokens. That's even more costly than Google's launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its most expensive AI model ever. In recent months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for 'priority' access to AI models — an additional premium on top of what AI models already cost that guarantees reliable, high speed performance. These expenses may be filtering their way down to AI coding tools, which seem to be getting more expensive across the industry. Users of another popular AI tool, Replit, were also caught off guard in recent weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive. Cursor has become one of the most successful AI products on the market, reaching more than $500 million in ARR largely through subscriptions to its Pro plan. However, Cursor now faces intense competition from the AI providers it relies on, while simultaneously figuring out how to affordably serve their more expensive AI models. Anthropic's recently launched AI coding tool Claude Code has been a hit with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company's ARR to $4 billion, and likely taking some users from Cursor in the process. Last week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic employees that led product development of Claude Code. But if Cursor intends to keep its market-leading position, it can't stop working with the state-of-the-art model providers — at least, not until its own home-grown models are more reasonably competitive. So Anysphere recently struck multi-year deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to offer a $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan with very high rate limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan also told TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time. However, it certainly feels as if the pressure between Cursor and AI model developers is building.
TechCrunch
07-07-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Cursor apologizes for unclear pricing changes that upset users
The CEO of Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI-powered coding environment Cursor, apologized Friday for a poorly communicated pricing change to its $20-per-month Pro plan. The changes resulted in some users complaining that they unexpectedly faced additional costs. 'We recognize that we didn't handle this pricing rollout well and we're sorry,' said Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. 'Our communication was not clear enough and came as a surprise to many of you.' Truell is referring to a June 16 update to Cursor's Pro plan. Instead of Pro users getting 500 fast responses on advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and then unlimited responses at a slower rate, the company announced subscribers would now get $20 worth of usage per month, billed at API rates. The new plan allows users to run coding tasks in Cursor with their AI model of choice until they hit the $20 limit, and then users have to purchase additional credits to continue using it. However, Pro users took to social media to file their complaints in the weeks following the announcement. Many users said they ran out of requests in Cursor rather quickly under the new plan, in some cases after just a few prompts when using Anthropic's new Claude models, which are particularly popular for coding. Other users claimed they were unexpectedly charged additional costs, not fully understanding they'd be charged extra if they ran over the $20 usage limit and had not set a spend limit. In the new plan, only Cursor's 'auto mode,' which routes to AI models based on capacity, offers unlimited usage for Pro users. Anysphere says it plans to refund users that were unexpectedly charged, and aims to be more clear about pricing changes moving forward. The company declined TechCrunch's request for comment beyond the blog post. Truell notes in the blog that Anysphere changed Cursor's pricing because 'new models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks' — meaning that some of the latest AI models have become more expensive, spending a lot of time and computational resources to complete complicated, multi-step tasks. Cursor was eating those costs under its old Pro plan, but now, it's passing them along to users. Techcrunch event Save $450 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $450 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW While many AI models have lowered in price, the cutting edge of performance continues to be expensive — in some cases, more pricey than ever. Anthropic's recently launched Claude Opus 4 model is $15 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire 'Lord of The Rings' series) and $75 per million output tokens. That's even more costly than Google's launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its most expensive AI model ever. In recent months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for 'priority' access to AI models — an additional premium on top of what AI models already cost that guarantees reliable, high speed performance. These expenses may be filtering their way down to AI coding tools, which seem to be getting more expensive across the industry. Users of another popular AI tool, Replit, were also caught off guard in recent weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive. Cursor has become one of the most successful AI products on the market, reaching more than $500 million in ARR largely through subscriptions to its Pro plan. However, Cursor now faces intense competition from the AI providers it relies on, while simultaneously figuring out how to affordably serve their more expensive AI models. Anthropic's recently launched AI coding tool Claude Code has been a hit with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company's ARR to $4 billion, and likely taking some users from Cursor in the process. Last week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic employees that led product development of Claude Code. But if Cursor intends to keep its market-leading position, it can't stop working with the state-of-the-art model providers — at least, not until its own home-grown models are more reasonably competitive. So Anysphere recently struck multi-year deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to offer a $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan with very high rate limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan also told TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time. However, it certainly feels as if the pressure between Cursor and AI model developers is building.
