xAI Poaches Top Cursor Engineers as Musk Admits Grok Falls Behind in Coding

xAI Raids Cursor's Leadership Ranks

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has recruited two of the most senior engineers from Cursor, the red-hot AI coding startup, in a bid to close a widening gap in coding capabilities.

Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, who jointly led engineering and product at Cursor, are joining xAI to work directly on coding tools. Milich focused on scaling AI agents at Cursor, while Ginsberg built several of the platform's core features, including its debugging mode and AI coding agent.

A Very Public Admission

The hires came just one day after Musk told an audience at the Abundance Summit that Grok is currently behind in coding. He revealed he had been late to his own appearance because he was leading an all-hands meeting focused entirely on catching up to rivals.

The admission followed a turbulent period for xAI. Six of its twelve original co-founders have departed, including Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang, who left after Musk complained that xAI's coding tools could not compete with Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex. At least eleven engineers also departed in a single week in February. Musk went so far as to say the company was not built right the first time and is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Cursor's Meteoric Rise Continues

The departures are a significant loss for Cursor, which is currently in talks for a funding round that would value the company at roughly fifty billion dollars, nearly double its valuation from last autumn. Cursor's annualised revenue surpassed two billion dollars in February, with around sixty percent coming from enterprise customers, making it one of the fastest-growing software companies in history.

The Race Ahead

Musk has set an ambitious target of catching up on coding by the middle of this year. Earlier this year, Anthropic cut off xAI staff from using Claude models through Cursor, a move that xAI acknowledged would hurt productivity but would force the company to develop its own tools. Whether Milich and Ginsberg can help deliver results on Musk's timeline remains an open question in an increasingly competitive market.