Cursor has made a name for itself among programmers. Now it is building a tool for people who do not write code. According to The Information, it is developing a general-purpose agent codenamed Sand that is designed to answer emails and messages, manage spreadsheets, and organize documents. It would be Cursor’s first product aimed at ordinary office workers rather than just developers. And its launch is not yet certain.
So what is Sand?
Sand is a personal agent for everyday work. The Information reports that it can respond to emails and text messages and organize data in spreadsheets. But it also extends into engineering work, so it is not limited to administrative tasks.
The information comes from two people familiar with the project. It is part of Cursor’s effort to expand beyond programming tools. The company began testing Sand among its own employees at the end of June. Work on it started in April.
For now, this is based on a single source and concerns an unreleased product. Details are lacking about which models power the agent, exactly how it differs from the competition, or how much it will cost. Moreover, internal testing is not the same as having a finished product on the market.
Cursor wants more users
The goal is to bring Cursor to a much larger audience. Today, it is used mainly by developers, but Sand would target people in finance, human resources, or marketing.
For Cursor, this is a significant shift. The company built its entire identity around software engineers. Its AI-powered code editor, created by modifying Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, reached annual revenue of around four billion dollars at the beginning of June. That is roughly double the figure from February. The tool is used by nearly two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called it his favorite enterprise AI service. Stripe says that all 40,000 of its engineers use it. Sand would bring this momentum to a far larger group of people.
Strong competition
Anthropic recently expanded its Claude Cowork tool from desktop to mobile and the web. Two days later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work, an agent powered by the GPT-5.6 model. The two labs are racing to dominate the workplace. And now Cursor is entering the fray as well.
Cursor’s offering would look different, however. Cowork and ChatGPT Work are good at gathering files, summarizing them, and creating new ones. Cursor has spent years building integrations through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard first published by Anthropic in 2024. Its agents already connect to Vercel, GitHub, Slack, and other services.
As a result, Cursor can take a work-in-progress design and deploy it directly to the web. For a freelancer who wants a landing page to be live right away, rather than merely coded, this difference matters. The number of contenders for the role of office agent is growing. But Cursor is one of the rare newcomers arriving with a million users already accustomed to entrusting their work to artificial intelligence.
The Musk question
Sand’s fate has become entangled in the biggest deal in the AI industry. In June, SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, for $60 billion in stock. This happened just days after SpaceX’s own record-breaking debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The deal is expected to close this quarter.
Cursor began renting computing power from the SpaceXAI division in April, the same month development of Sand began. The two companies also jointly released the Grok 4.5 model last week. The question of whether Sand will ever see the light of day may therefore not be up to Cursor. Musk may decide it.
Cursor’s rise was built on neutrality. Developers can choose the most suitable model for each task, from Claude and OpenAI’s GPT to Google’s Gemini and Cursor’s own Composer. Many enterprise teams chose it specifically so they could keep sensitive code on the Claude model.
SpaceX now also owns xAI, the creator of the Grok model. Every task that Cursor sends to a competitor means money leaving Musk’s domain. Analysts therefore fear that Cursor will become merely a platform for Musk’s models instead of offering a diverse selection. Cursor CEO Michael Truell has stated that model independence remains essential to the product, but once the acquisition closes, this promise may no longer carry any weight.
Sources: thenextweb.com and aiweekly.co
