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As Cursor launches the next generation of its product, the AI coding startup has to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic more directly than ever.

Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which have taken off with millions of developers in recent months.

“In the last few months, our profession has completely changed,” said Jonas Nelle, one of Cursor’s heads of engineering, in an interview with WIRED. “A lot of the product that got Cursor here is not as important going forward anymore.”

Cursor increasingly finds itself in competition with leading AI labs for developers and enterprise customers. The company pioneered one of the first and most popular ways for developers to code with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor one of these companies’ biggest AI customers. But in the last 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic have launched agentic coding products of their own, and started offering them through highly subsidized subscriptions that have put pressure on Cursor’s business.

While Cursor’s core product lets developers code in an integrated development environment (IDE) and tap an AI model for help, new products like Claude Code and Codex center around allowing developers to off-load entire tasks to an AI agent—sometimes spinning up multiple agents at the same time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s version of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the product is optimized for a world where developers spend their days “conversing with different agents, checking in on them, and seeing the work that they did,” rather than writing code themselves.

Cursor is launching its new agentic coding interface inside its existing desktop app, where it will live alongside the IDE. At the center of a new window in Cursor, there’s a text box where users can type, in natural language, a task they’d like an AI agent to complete—it looks more like a chatbot than a coding environment. Press enter, the AI agent sets to work without requiring the developer to write a single line of code. In a sidebar on the left, developers can view and manage all of the AI agents they have running in Cursor.

What’s unique about Cursor 3, compared to desktop apps for Claude Code and Codex, is that it integrates an agent-first product with Cursor’s AI-powered development environment. In a demo, Cursor’s other cohead of engineering for Cursor 3, Alexi Robbins, showed WIRED how users can prompt an agent in the cloud to spin up a feature, and then review the code it generated locally on their computer.