Cursor Sand: the Claude Cowork rival with a Musk catch

This article was published on July 13, 2026 Cursor, the coding tool used across two-thirds of the Fortune 500, is quietly building a general-purpose agent called Sand to take on Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work. But with Elon Musk’s SpaceX buying the company for $60bn, the bigger question is whose model ends up reading your email. The race to automate the office just gained a third runner. Cursor is building Sand, a general-purpose agent to rival Claude Cowork. Whether it ever ships may come down to Elon Musk. Cursor made its name as a tool for people who write code. Now it is building one for people who do not. According to The Information, the company is developing a general-purpose AI agent, codenamed Sand, meant to take on Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. It is designed to answer emails and texts, wrangle spreadsheets and organise documents, and it also reaches into engineering work. It would be Cursor’s first product aimed at ordinary office workers rather than developers. The company began testing Sand internally in late June, on computing power it started leasing from Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI in April. A public launch is not promised. Sand leaked in a crowded week.