Cowork, ChatGPT Work and now Sand: Cursor enters the office agent race
Cursor, the AI-powered code editor adopted by nearly two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, is developing a generalist agent aimed not at developers but at regular employees. The project, which according to The Information is codenamed Sand, aims to compete with Anthropic's Claude Cowork and OpenAI's ChatGPT Work. Internal testing began at the end of June, and a public launch is not yet planned.
Sand is designed to respond to emails and messages, manage spreadsheets, and organize documents, even venturing into engineering work. It would be Cursor's first product targeted at office personnel who do not write code, thus addressing staff dedicated to finance, human resources, marketing, and similar activities. This marks a sharp shift for a company that has built its identity around the figure of the developer.
A third competitor in the office race
The news comes in a crowded week: on July 7, Anthropic brought Claude Cowork beyond the desktop, onto mobile and web devices; two days later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work, the agent based on the GPT-5.6 model. Both labs aim to secure the workday, a territory that Cursor now also wishes to enter.
Its proposal would be different. Cowork and ChatGPT Work excel at gathering files, summarizing them, and producing new ones; Cursor, on the other hand, has spent years building integrations through the Model Context Protocol, the open standard published by Anthropic in 2024, and Sand would leverage this as the predominant work method.
The editor, derived from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, had reached about $4 billion in annualized revenue by early June, roughly double compared to February. Jensen Huang of Nvidia has called it his favorite AI service for businesses, and Stripe states that all 40,000 of its engineers use it. Sand would bring this machine to a much broader audience.
The Musk Unknown
However, there is a significant issue: in June, SpaceX acquired Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, for $60 billion in stock, just days after its record debut on Nasdaq. The deal is expected to close within this quarter. Cursor began renting computing power from Musk's ecosystem in April, the same month that the development of Sand reportedly started, and last week the two companies jointly released Grok 4.5. If Sand ever sees the light of day, it may not be Cursor that decides this.
Cursor's rise has relied on neutrality: the tool allows developers to choose the model for each task, from Claude to OpenAI's GPT, from Google’s Gemini to the in-house developed Composer. Many corporate teams have adopted it precisely to keep sensitive code on Claude. But SpaceX now controls xAI, which produces Grok, and any task routed toward a rival model represents revenue lost from Musk's ecosystem.
Analysts fear that Cursor may transform from a neutral layer into a bet on a single supplier. CEO Michael Truell has reiterated that model agnosticism "remains central to the product," a promise that will have no contractual value once the merger is finalized. At this point, Sand seems more a channel than a standalone product: an office agent embedded in Cursor's infrastructure would give Grok its first mass access to a non-technical audience, right in companies already connected to Cursor's tools. The real game, then, is played elsewhere: it concerns the survival of the neutral tool that those users have chosen, now that it is changing ownership.