Ooh, new drama just dropped 👀

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_wOvAN_@reddit

Modified MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy

of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal

in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights

to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell

copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all

copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR

IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE

AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER

LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,

OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE

SOFTWARE.

Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works

thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have

more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars

(or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently

display "Kimi K2" on the user interface of such product or service.

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r15km4tr1x@reddit

Must be why perplexity dropped it also

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Torodaddy@reddit

For web search its very very good, for everything else there are better/cheaper tools

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dilberx@reddit

I thought gemini was best for that as it has google search algos🤔

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pier4r@reddit

perplexity had Kimi K2.5 as option for a long time. Dunno if they tried to make their own version.

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Technical-Earth-3254@reddit

They dropped it for Nemotron Super. The worst trade in history.

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guiriduro@reddit

Maybe not if you wanted to baitswitch/enshitify/ trade on the reputation for quality K2 brought you while lowering your costs for as long as it takes your users to notice

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The default model seems to be Gemini 3.1 Pro (at least thats what my Perplexity Pro sub always switches back to). I'm pretty sure K2.5 is cheaper than that. It's also at the very bottom and I doubt many people select the os/ow model anyway, bc normal users don't know what Kimi or Nemotron is lol. I just noticed that Nemotron is hallucinating quite often (unsurprisingly) while K2.5 was just as resistant to hallucinating in Perplexity as Gemini Pro is.

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sergeant113@reddit

Gemini Pro is resistant to hallucination? That’s news to me.

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robogame_dev@reddit

It’s actually terrible at hallucination, at least with whatever settings perplexity has - feels like 50%+ hallucination rate on queries this past week for me. I have conversations where every answer got thumbs down.

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Excellent_Log_3920@reddit

This is the most important part "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." It's supposed to create a chain of citations like in academic papers.

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AnActualWizardIRL@reddit

So heres a fun thing. We all know that model outputs can't be copyrighted because they are created by a robot rather than a humans creativity. Been enough court cases now that this is pretty firmly established law. So that raises another thorny question;- Can models themselves be copyrighted? since they are created by the the software without that much human input other than feeding it a dataset. Intuitively the answer seems to be yes, but the more I think about it the more it would suggest the wording of copyright laws and judgements might make that not so straight forward.

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philosophical_lens@reddit

That part is the standard MIT license. The modification is about the user interface.

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agentcubed@reddit

I have no clue where you got that from. Please stop spreading misinformation unless you have a source to back that up.

I can't find any mentions by the authors of MIT that their goal was to create a research citation chain, nor does that make any sense. It's to identify the original owner and license, so legal teams can find the original terms and verify you were granted permission.

And none of this means use. If I take an MIT project, I can name it whatever I want, just that if I distribute it, the original copyright notice must stay.

In fact, it doesn't even need to be included visually, just that the license is bundled into source code. If you host a website, your license file doesn't actually include 200+ licenses of all the packages you used, it just means if you open up each package source code, you'll see the copyright notice on top. It'll usually be a single comment line on top of the minified source code. And to be clear, that's only if you DISTRIBUTE the software, if you request an API from a server, they do not need to give you any license information of the internal packages they use.

In short, your comment makes no sense.

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NoWarning789@reddit

I'm not on top of this. Did the company behind Cursor distribute a model claiming it was theirs when it wasn't?

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waiting_for_zban@reddit

I'm not on top of this. Did the company behind Cursor distribute a model claiming it was theirs when it wasn't?

It's worse. They didn't distribute it. Composer is not even open weight.

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NoWarning789@reddit

But that is not worse.

I understand the PR issue of Cursor claimed they built a model they didn't build.

But the MIT license requires the license/attribution when you distribute the software. If you just use the software on a server and an API access it, you don't need to share with the world the license and attribution.

Every Linux server is full of MIT licensed software and it doesn't transfer to the API or other uses of that software. Not even the GPLv2 and GPLv3 do that. Only the GPLv3 with the Affero clause do that AFAIK.

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waiting_for_zban@reddit

You're right, MIT does not oblige that downstream modifications should be distributed too.

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Ayvah01@reddit

This is the MIT licence, which in its standard form does not apply to any derivative works. However, if portions of the original work remains in the derivative work in verbatim, then the original licence still applies to that portion.

If this is a fine-tuned AI model, then there is no verbatim component to apply the MIT licence to.

To have the licence apply to derivative works, you would need to use a copyleft licence such as GPL or Creative Commons licences.

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Turbulent-Half-1515@reddit

So, the real WTF is not Cursor using it, but MoonshotAI calling it an opensource model, but then using a modified MIT license (which probably makes it impossible to use for anyone, you would need lawers to check the licence, as it is not a standard license)

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ReadyAndSalted@reddit

I'm not entirely sure why you need a lawyer to understand the license here. It just demands credit in the user interface of your product if you make more than $20m in revenue or have more than 100m users. I'd still be happy to call this open weights, as it still allows for any use, it just wants credit.

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More-Curious816@reddit

This drama is nothing burger. Every open source license require a credit.

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philosophical_lens@reddit

This is obviously not true. If this was true then they could have used the standard MIT license instead of a modified license.

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Turbulent-Half-1515@reddit

This is not true, you can use MIT without giving credit (what is that even?) to anyone...just if you redistribute the code (which cursor didn't do), you need to attach the same MIT licence, thats it.

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suamai@reddit

The drama is that Cursor is using K2 without giving credit.

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Turbulent-Half-1515@reddit

I think you heavily underestimate the complexity of open source licenses. First question: is finetuning derivative work or not?

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ReadyAndSalted@reddit

Yes, next question.

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philosophical_lens@reddit

The modifications only kick in if you have over 100M users or 20M revenue. Most people will never hit this threshold and it's just a standard MIT license at that point.

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cheechw@reddit

I'm an IP lawyer. This is literally industry standard. Go check literally any open source repo on GitHub. Every piece of open source software (at least that I'm aware of) has commercial use clauses, albeit with different thresholds.

Also, to imply that Cursor as an entity doesn't have any lawyers with knowledge of IP or tech law is kind of ridiculous. If that were the case, then their management is being seriously negligent at the scale they're operating at.

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agentcubed@reddit

I think you need to differentiate "open weight/downloable" "open source/source available" and "open source license"

A code can technically be "open source" as long as the source is open, but for the license to be an "open source license" is a different definition*

I actually find it hard to find an open source project that has commercial clauses. Famous examples of open source software on GitHub all have unmodified licenses with no commercial use clauses: VSCode (MIT), Android (Apache), Blender (GNU), React+basically all libraries/packages (MIT)

Can you actually give some counterexamples of famous projects that the community considers open source that also have commercial use clauses? I agree, there are tons of "source is open" that use a non "open source license", but it seems the community doesn't really mean that to be "open source". In general, the community seems to be strictly against labeling a license with commercial clause as an "open source license"

There are also tons of examples of "open weight" models that have a non open source license.

*Whether a "open source" project with a commercial use clause qualifies as an "open source license" is debatable, but if you use the OSI's definition of open source license, it's tough because of the "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" clause. They specifically don't allow an open source license that discriminates based on commercial usage (like . https://opensource.org/osd#:\~:text=5.%20No%20Discrimination%20Against%20Persons%20or%20Groups

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keepthepace@reddit

Honestly, feels like a honest mistake to not see the modified clause and to fix it once notified. Cursor should now call its composer model "Kimi Composer" or something.

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cheechw@reddit

It's not an honest mistake. Almost all open source software licenses contain this kind of commercial use clause. I don't recall seeing a single one in the past while that doesn't. The only difference is typically what the thresholds are (some have requirements for minimum revenue, some require licenses for any commercial use at all, no matter what the size of the company).

Cursor is sophisticated enough of an entity that they should know.

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ost99@reddit

No normal open source license requires attribution in the product itself.

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Neex@reddit

Not true.

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ost99@reddit

Please link to a OSI approved license that has that as part of the standard license text.

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fiddlerwoaroof@reddit

Wasn’t this part of the original BSD license? Not OSI approved, but the FSF considers it free software

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the .

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0jabr@reddit

Yes, and everyone getting sick of that clause and abandoning the original BSD is part of what drove the MIT license to become the most widely used license.

Then the simplified, two-clause BSD without that advertising requirement came out, and I believe it is the most commonly used BSD variant now.

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Polite_Jello_377@reddit

Bullshit. A huge volume of open source is straight MIT or Apache license

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Middle_Bullfrog_6173@reddit

No, most do not contain such a clause. The basic MIT license does not, nor does Apache 2. Those are the main ones used for open models.

Many licenses require you to reproduce the copyright notice if you distribute the software/model (or modified versions) but that does not mean any disclosure of what's running behind your API endpoint.

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thatsnot_kawaii_bro@reddit

But why not use AI to just read over the clauses for any modifications?

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alerikaisattera@reddit

The requirements of this modified MIT license are in compliance with FSF and OSI criteria, therefore it is open source

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Due-Major6105@reddit

Providing a source isn't a particularly difficult requirement, is it?

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KaMaFour@reddit

Even AI labs are slowly learning that MIT license is shit...

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Unfortunya333@reddit

What do you prefer copyleft? Copyleft is the worst thing ever created

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Minute_Attempt3063@reddit

They literally gave it this license so this can be done

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koriwi@reddit

elaborate pls

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SufficientPie@reddit

But this was trained on my open source software, which is also MIT licensed, and I don't see any attribution to me... 😒

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Worried-Ad-7351@reddit

HAHA

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Tiny_Mouse5009@reddit

LOL

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Tiny_Mouse5009@reddit

lol

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jizzju@reddit

LMAO

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AnActualWizardIRL@reddit

This might shock some people but I genuinely cant wait for the AI market crash. Knock out a tonne of these shitty SaaS services and water gobbling data centers , and free up the fabricators to start making home PCs capable of running good open source models at home. Thats the future, not this "you will pay forever and own nothing" model of AI. Home AI, running on AI accelerators of some sort (Be it GPUs with large unified memory setups or CPUs with AI accelorator type extension. And you own your own stuff, and get to pay your rent

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Nyghtbynger@reddit

I agree with the principle of smashing them into the water. However Batched inference is still more efficient resource-wise. I don't really want user electricity grids to fail because of AI..
I'm all in for the advertisement and attention economy crashing however.

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AnActualWizardIRL@reddit

At this point I'm actually OK with the whole damn economy crashing , if it means housing and rent prices end up going down.

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Nyghtbynger@reddit

I get it. The one that possess the power will not do a controled demolition. So it's all-in in the shitshow anyway

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alcalde@reddit

It's like the days many of you don't remember where you paid for Internet by the hour and long distance calls by the minute. Then everyone forgot the bad old days and embraced "the cloud" and started paying for things by the hour all over again. :-(

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Quaglek@reddit

The data centers don't actually use that much water.

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nemaroit@reddit

You guys still using cursor?

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SufficientPie@reddit

Yes. What would you suggest to replace it?

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alcalde@reddit

Humans.

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SufficientPie@reddit

lol no

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my_name_isnt_clever@reddit

Never have, never will.

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

Pretty gross to rename a model and upload it as your own. Who cares what the license is.

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AppealSame4367@reddit

You don't understand man. Americans are the good people, they would never steal from Asians. That's why this cannot be gross and it hasn't happened. Or if it did happen, it was only fair retaliation for - checks notes - distilling on American models! King Joffrey out

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Maximum-Ad7780@reddit

Are you F-ing kidding? That is not the direction IP theft has gone. Also, look what race the designers often are at Chinese companies.

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AppealSame4367@reddit

Spot the American:
1. Stealing from everybody, but big whiny whiny when the others are stealing, too.
2. Making it about "race" (a term I don't know, because in Germany it's forbidden to make statements like this, because it's.. racist, my racist American friend)

Man, i you people suck so much.

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alcalde@reddit

America doesn't steal from anyone; America invented everything from the cotton gin to cotton candy, along with the integrated circuit, the home computer, the cell phone, the television, the record player....

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AppealSame4367@reddit

Bullshit. America steals from everyone all the time _while_ also inventing lots of stuff. The same as other nations. You have a beautiful picture of your great nation that just isn't true. Modern tech like tv, ICs, PCs, etc has been invented based on inventions and parts from all over the world.

Example: ASML from the Netherlands builds the machines that make highend chips (and couldn't be duplicated even by China so far after 10 years of trying), a German company builds the optics for these machines and cannot be duplicated easily. And so on.

CERN in Switzerland invented a lot of the tech necessary for modern Chips, Internet, Quantum computers.

And in all this I didn't even mentioned all the Japanase, Korean, Russian, Chinese etc inventions that work in everything you have in front of you today.

Look how nations are racing for quantum computers, fusion power and drones, then you get what it was always like in the past, too. Everything, everwhere, made at once. Read up what is behind the first tv and it's tech.

And stop claiming that the US doesn't steal from anyone.

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konovalov-nk@reddit

Cursor team has a lot of "Asians" 🤷 https://www.linkedin.com/company/cursorai/people/

No need to steal anything 🤷

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AppealSame4367@reddit

???

So having "Asians" on your team makes you..??? I don't get it

Wasn't trying to make this a racist thing my friend.

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konovalov-nk@reddit

Nah you didn't get what I'm saying, I mean if you're using "Americans" to say they're reason for "stealing" then this is invalid because Cursor team has people from all sort of countries, and a lot of AI/ML engineers come from Asia. So really my point is that using specific nation to justify actions of a company doesn't really work.

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AppealSame4367@reddit

Ah ok, thx for explaining. And what I meant where the whiny comments by OpenAI / Antrohpic CEOs about "Chinese companies distilling their models" as if they didn't steal all their data from everyone around.

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Webfarer@reddit

We all know OpenAI and Anthropic has no single Asian and “purely” American, unlike Cursor.

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Everlier@reddit

Cursor is a kind of temporary relevant company, they capitalise on everyone being slow and not ready to solve a specific problem, offering a solution quickly. The disadvantage is that they don't have a solid pre-existing base/foundation to rely on. They are not an LLM provider or an AI lab, so they can only do so much with the API inference costs to power their plans. They used an existing product as a base which comes with a ton of legacy, so their ability to innovate is limited.

I really don't see an issue with them picking Kimi 2.5 and RL-ing it, that's how Open Weight models would be used by corps/orgs and that's what Kimi's license allows.

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alcalde@reddit

Warren Buffett would say that Cursor doesn't have "a moat", a sustainable competitive advantage that prevents others from stepping in and doing the same thing they're doing.

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Whyme-__-@reddit

I used cursor for 1 day and went back to Antigravity(to review documents in Md and Db schema) and Claudcode $200 subscription. Now with 1M context window in opus you don’t need the nonsense auto complete from cursor. I’m still confused as to why people still use cursor.

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NumerousCollection30@reddit

what benefits would you say antigravity has? i haven't used it before

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Whyme-__-@reddit

Same thing as cursor but owned by Google and has native agentic capabilities and Gemini integration for everything.

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oneFookinLegend@reddit

cheap, works pretty well if you know what you're doing

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Testing_things_out@reddit

RL-ing it

What's that?

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Everlier@reddit

Training via reinforcement learning technique, widely used for agentic capabilities

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ServersServant@reddit

Don’t get why they have to push down everyone’s throats their own way of doing things. Overwriting shortcuts, a UI that only makes you slower if you are used to VSCode, poor out of the box settings and prompts, and they haven’t really improved from VSCode’s starting point. They could’ve been an extension.

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Dogeboja@reddit

Cursor was incredible back when it was burning about VC money. I got so much work done with the 20 dollar sub.

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ArtfulGenie69@reddit

I still do, just flip it back to legacy charging and you get the basic token cost again instead of charging you for every token it should be 2 or so per prompt. At least that's how much opus 4.6 was costing last I checked. You get 500 tokens a month just like before btw

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Jsteakfries@reddit

yea seem they failed to blitzscale and grab market share while they had the VC money, but there simply was no network effect that made switching hard or staying valuable

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under_psychoanalyzer@reddit

Have you switched to something else?

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Dogeboja@reddit

Claude Code yea like 6 months ago

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spinozasrobot@reddit

Perplexity has entered the chat

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meatycowboy@reddit

yeah they're gonna be one of the first to go when the bubble pops

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emprahsFury@reddit

Perplexity fine tunes their own models...

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Torodaddy@reddit

Prompts...

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Webfarer@reddit

In-context fine tuning experts.

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spinozasrobot@reddit

Do you have proof of that? My understanding is they are primarily a wrapper on other (user selectable) frontier llm models. They may have fine tuned an open source model as well, but obviously fine tuning another model is not the same as building your own.

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Everlier@reddit

Yes, same sorry. But to be fair they show acute awareness of the temporary need in such a solution and are trying to find some permanent use case for themselves with comet and computer, good luck though.

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Elegant_League_9458@reddit

Fine tuning is fine, but deleting license and attribution then selling it as their own creation is another thing. Same happened to Rakuten's new "made in Japan model", and the trend behind is kind of concerning.

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oneFookinLegend@reddit

works pretty well enough

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MammayKaiseHain@reddit

That's like, every AI company not having a SotA LLM. Cursor is probably the best of this bunch and would be at a decent ARR from enterprise deals by now.

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Ok-Pipe-5151@reddit

An "AI" company doesn't make either of

- ML models

- software infrastructure (e.g. runtime, accelerator, vector DB etc)

- hardware

is NOT an AI company, it is a wrapper. Also ARR is a braindead metric to assess anything about a company. Because if it is not a vendor locked system, the "recurring" part is far from the truth.

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MammayKaiseHain@reddit

Every company is a "wrapper" of something. Value can be added at any layer.

Fair enough about ARR, but it's better than nothing.

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Ok-Pipe-5151@reddit

You are totally confusing between wrapper and architectural abstraction. A wrapper is something with thin abstraction layer over some existing piece of technology, like Cursor to VSCode. VSCode in the same sense is not wrapper over electron or JS, it uses their APIs to develop own sets of features.

And even a thin abstraction can create value. The issue is, it doesn't build any moat. It is extremely difficult to build a VScode like editor from scratch, replicating the plugin ecosystem is even harder. This is a clear moat. But if you have just created a fork with a integrated AI daemon, anyone can (and already have) build the same.

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Ketworld@reddit

Seems like it’s a trend. Perplexity and now Cursor. I guess they are loosing subs to Claude Code or just Open Ai now there is codex. In fact that reminds me to cancel my cursor sub and my replit sub.

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Therealonewhoknocks@reddit

What would you use instead of replit? I’m currently trying to migrate away.

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alcalde@reddit

Humans.

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Ketworld@reddit

I’m using Claude code. I bought the max plan 10X $100 PCM, and I did cancel my replit and cursor subscriptions after I posted that comment. I won’t use cursor after I’ve used Claude Code. The token limits are a joke, and they switch models on you without notifying you, the dumb dumb models just start breaking your code base. With CC you are always guaranteed Sonnet or Opus; no nasty surprises. As for replit, it’s great to sketch out ideas, but I always end up taking it into cursor, and Claude always ends up making replits she’ll actually working. Why have all the middle men / Claude wrappers when you can have the source?

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OmarDaily@reddit

Are you still using Cursor free as your IDE or something else?.

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Cool-Hornet4434@reddit

"Even Elon Musk..." No... that's his whole shtick... he can't make any thing good so he looks for every opportunity to jump on something that lets him make others look bad.

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alcalde@reddit

Teslas, rockets, Starlink, Grok. He's a nutty drug addict, but his companies do have a track record of upending the status quo in multiple fields.

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atuarre@reddit

Do we really care what Elon Musk thinks?

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alcalde@reddit

As Grok's father, yes.

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Ok-Pipe-5151@reddit

Fuck all of these stupid wrapper vaporware which are driven by nothing but hype.

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lemon07r@reddit

I used to go on rants about cursor and composer and nobody would get why, they thought it was this amazing proprietary model and I was like no it's not, it's 100% some sort of open weight model they barely trained on top of, then threw their system prompt on top of. So tired of these apologists

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Ok-Pipe-5151@reddit

Cursor and similar apps are stupid from both engineering and ML perspectives. They raised hundreds of millions to fork VsCode, when most of the features could be just provided through a plugin. Zed has built a entirely custom editor with own GUI framework in rust, at a fraction of funding Cursor has raised so far.

For the AI part, not explanation needed. They used claude for two years, then got fucked by anthropic. Now they're resorting to open weight models, while violating license terms. And some geniuses here are accusing moonshot for modifying MIT license, so that VC funded companies can free ride.

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catagris@reddit

Yeah and anthropic comes in and does just that. Makes a plugin for VS Code that does almost everything Cursor can.

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dogesator@reddit

Cursor has a ton of real users and billions in real revenue. Far from vaporware.

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gigamiga@reddit

Hey they’re driven by over subscribed venture funding rounds too! Oh wait that’s still hype…carry on

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bwjxjelsbd@reddit

Why Cursor would even trying to have their own model here?

Literally better off being wrapper and charge % on it like open router

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artgallery69@reddit

without their own model they'd soon become irrelevant, acting as a provider of other models they could easily get cut off from margins because they're paying the price of the api plus the cost of running cursor. why would people use cursor when the models they want are offered by providers at a cheaper cost?

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bwjxjelsbd@reddit

Openrouter seems to be doing just fine?

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das_war_ein_Befehl@reddit

Margin

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TheMcSebi@reddit

Who still gives a fuck about Elon Musk

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Maximum-Ad7780@reddit

Probably all of the investors and users of starlink and optimus

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ken107@reddit

people who dont suffer from MDS musk derangement syndrome?

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TonyPace@reddit

people who can be bought

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Codemonkeyzz@reddit

Are they selling Kimi K2.5 as "composer 2" as is ? or did they fine tune the model using their own RL pipeline ? Can't understand what's the problem?

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JockY@reddit

The problem is that the Kimi license requires attribution that was not given.

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SufficientPie@reddit

So does all the open source content Kimi was trained on.

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JockY@reddit

Not all. Some. For example, many open source data sources are pure MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed, which require no attribution. Free as in speech, not as in beer.

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SufficientPie@reddit

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

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JockY@reddit

You have apparently quoted something. What you quoted is unclear. What are you attempting to convey? Where's this quote from? Why is it relevant?

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SufficientPie@reddit

The attribution requirements from the licenses you mentioned

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JockY@reddit

That’s not the attribution to which I referred. You quoted standard MIT. The Kimi license is a modified MIT that requires explicit visible attribution of Kimi K2 for use in products that generate over $10m in revenue per month.

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SufficientPie@reddit

We're not talking about Kimi license

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JockY@reddit

Yes we are. That's exactly the topic here.

Cursor used Kimi K2 without attribution, so the license in question is the Kimi K2 license, which is a modified MIT.

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SufficientPie@reddit

No, this is a sub-thread about Kimi being trained on open-source code and you claiming that "many open source data sources are pure MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed, which require no attribution"

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JockY@reddit

Which part is incorrect?

Some source code is Public Domain, which is perfectly fine to use as training data.

And neither MIT nor Apache 2.0 requires attribution; only the following constraints are enforced:

MIT requires only that the copyright notice and license be preserved in derivative works.

Apache 2.0 requires that the copyright notice, license, modifications statement, and NOTICE file (if present) be included with derivative works.

The Kimi K2 license was MIT with an extra clause: that _attribution _ be made visibly if the derivative works are used by an org with revenue in excess of $10m/mo.

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SufficientPie@reddit

MIT requires only that the copyright notice … be preserved in derivative works.

Apache 2.0 requires that the copyright notice … be included with derivative works.

That's attribution. You are required to include the original copyright notice including the name of the copyright holder who wrote that version of the code.

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RuthlessCriticismAll@reddit

Training is not copying however copying is copying. This isn't complicated.

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SufficientPie@reddit

Training creates a derivative work

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ekaj@reddit

They’re quoting from the MIT License

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JockY@reddit

Ah yes, ok. Kimi K2 isn't actually MIT, it's an MIT derivative that includes an extra clause:

Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently display "Kimi K2" on the user interface of such product or service.

No such notice was (is?) present.

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CacheConqueror@reddit

This is not the first time for Cursor, they already broke EU laws once

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JockY@reddit

Turns out it was authorized use all along. Moonshot confirmed it.

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CacheConqueror@reddit

That doesn't change the fact that Cursor is a scam. They've been doing this for a year and a half, and people are still buying their plans with enthusiasm. Strange changes to the plans, operating in a way that violates EU law—they called something “unlimited” when it wasn’t—deliberately degrading the quality of the models—there have already been five cases of this, and what? And now there’s another one because they’re selling Composer 2 as their own model, when it’s actually Kimi K2.

I don’t know what users need to do to start boycotting Cursor, because so far you can just trash-talk them and "attack them" from behind, and nothing happens.

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JockY@reddit

What’s the scam?

People pay them money and get exactly what was advertised. I don’t get it. I don’t use it, either, but if you’re gonna call it a scam then at least back it up.

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CacheConqueror@reddit

Don't you understand the word "scam," or is there something else you don't get? Check out their website, it explains it there.

"We're rapidly improving the quality of our model. Composer 2" Composer 1 was still theirs, but 2 isn't, because it's Kimi's, so nothing has improved except for switching their composer to Kimi. The only thing that's improved is the appeal of it supposedly being theirs. Besides, the stats don't mean much, because it turns out that Opus handles tasks and planning better than Composer 2. Composer 2 is currently running at full speed, just like Gemini 2.5 did for a few months. I'd bet that in a few months, Composer's quality will drop just as suddenly :)

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JockY@reddit

No, words like “scam” are too complicated for me 🙄

Seems like they’re too complicated for you, too, because despite your word salad there was no clear description of the supposed scam (“a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation; to deceive and defraud”).

I’ll say it again: people pay money to Cursor for a service. They receive the service. That’s not a deception and it’s not fraudulent.

Use your words. How is cursor a scam?

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CacheConqueror@reddit

Read this again before you start replying, you know different between scam and scaming?

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JockY@reddit

*scamming has 2 “m” characters.

And clearly you can’t use your words to explain why it’s a scam because it’s not a scam. I gave you the dictionary definition and you still can’t back it up.

It’s fine to feel all squirmy and caught in a trap of your own making, and it’s fine to insult me as too stupid to understand. We can all see you’re too stubborn to simply recant your words and acknowledge it’s not a scam, just a business model you don’t like.

If I’m wrong, school me. But you don’t get a pass for “are you dumb?”, “don’t you understand the word scam?“ or other cop-outs. You’ve used those excuses twice already.

So what is it? You gonna explain to me why you think it’s a scam? Gonna retract your statement? Or are you going to throw more ad-hominem (google it) my way?

My bet is ad-hominem.

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CacheConqueror@reddit

Since you don't have any arguments, you're going to nitpick about spelling and missing letters, how pathetic. Since you know how to spell it correctly, you should know what it means, but you're just pretending so you can keep up this pointless conversation. There’s a big difference between “we trained our model” and “we used Kimi to train a model for our own purposes,” but a kid like you can be spat on and still think it’s raining. Stop embarrassing yourself and go back to school

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Codemonkeyzz@reddit

I wouldn't call it scam, they are more like dishonest. When they initially released Composer 2, they said nothing about being based on Kimi K2.5, until someone on X revealed it. They could be honest about it.

What's more weird is , first Moonshot said that Cursor didn't reach them for the licensing, but later they changed this statement and they said they are working together with Cursor on Composer 2. It seems something is done behind the scenes.

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bored_man_child@reddit

More likely moonshot employees didn’t know about the underlying agreements with Fireworks and Cursor. They deleted their tweets pretty fast.

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Codemonkeyzz@reddit

Yeah that seems to be the case , but doesn't that sound a bit weird ? How come the employees don't know about the agreement ? Cause it is a big deal , usually startups announce this kind of stuff pretty fast and loud company-wide. Cause it is a big win for them.

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bored_man_child@reddit

Probably because it’s actually an agreement with Fireworks inference, and Moonshot employees are heads down training their own new models. You don’t delete tweets that fast unless your own coworkers yell at you to delete it lol.

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JockY@reddit

You deflected from defining the scam and managed some ad-hominem to boot. Called it.

My turn for ad-hominem: I’m done arguing with idiots for the day.

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CacheConqueror@reddit

I’m not attacking anyone, I’m just stating the facts and you keep trying to make it seem like I’m the one at fault. Stop making a fool of yourself, kid.

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bored_man_child@reddit

Composer 2 isn’t just a name tag slapped on Kimi. I get that it’s fun to be outraged but nothing you’re saying is factually correct lol. Kimi was the base model that they trained on. Composer is a much better model than Kimi after more pretraining and reinforcement learning. Try them both side by side and then tell me they are the same model. Do you know how many models you use today are trained on open source base models?

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CockBrother@reddit

Late to the party - but - "fair use" "derivative work" or somesuch.

This is the game each and every one of them claims when hoovering the entire internet and all written works that exist to this day.

I could really care less if they start by copying each other's models.

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JockY@reddit

could really care less

*could really not care less.

Could care less means there are yet fewer fucks that you could give.

I always find this to be a funny Americanism. You’re welcome 😂

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CockBrother@reddit

You got me. Can't believe I did that.

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JockY@reddit

Love the good natured response!

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Codemonkeyzz@reddit

I see thanks for the details.

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Upbeat_Football_8480@reddit

This is exactly why open-source model-agnostic tools matter. If your entire workflow depends on one vendor's model, you're one controversy away from scrambling.

Being able to swap between Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, or whatever comes next should be table stakes at this point.

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Upbeat_Football_8480@reddit

Holy…I think there are more products like that we don’t know yet.

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lobabobloblaw@reddit

It's interesting. You can't really do hardware in this space without it becoming quickly irrelevant or obsolete, but you can design software to your heart's content low-key knowing that it will be absorbed into syntax one way or the other

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creynir@reddit

the license threshold approach is actually interesting — "use freely until you're big enough to owe attribution." whether cursor crossed $20M revenue or 100M MAU is the actual legal question and I am not sure anyone outside their finance team can answer that.

but the licensing drama is kind of a sideshow. the real issue is that cursor was incredible when they were burning VC money and now the business model is showing cracks. being a middleman between users and model providers means your margins depend on rates you pass through. once the underlying model changes (as it just did), your entire value prop resets. the tools that survive this will be the ones building actual infrastructure, not just routing to whatever is cheapest this month.

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Bob_Fancy@reddit

Who gives a fuck what Elon does? Also it’s not a surprise or a bad thing. 1.5 was the same.

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dadnothere@reddit

Private companies stealing open-source software without consequence? It's an everyday occurrence... But I'll go to jail for downloading a torrent... Damn capitalism for the poor and communism for the rich...

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

I don't think about him at all.

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Shockbum@reddit

They mention him in every post so that people like you get angry like a child throwing a tantrum.

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Bob_Fancy@reddit

Yes I am clearly throwing a tantrum with my one comment lol

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idiotiesystemique@reddit

What the fuck does this have to do with Elon lol

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ResidentPositive4122@reddit

It's reddit man. If it's not bots going haywire, it's certified meatbags going crazy. Spaceman bad and all that...

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ThisWillPass@reddit

Florida man?

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ForsookComparison@reddit

"okay hivemind! who am I mad at today?"

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ambassadortim@reddit

Op posted about the terd

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jgaskins@reddit

OP mentions him by name

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jgaskins@reddit

OP mentions him by name

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CorpusculantCortex@reddit

"Even Elon Musk has jumped in on the roasting"

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jglowbom@reddit

And this is why local open-source agents are the future.

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MathmoKiwi@reddit

Yet crazily Cursor is worth what... some 8x more I think than Kimi is as a company?

What the heck do the investors think they're paying Cursor for? They're not a frontier AI lab. Even their IDE was a ripoff.

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Django_McFly@reddit

I was about to cancel my Cursor plan because Auto/Composer 1.5 was balls and the only value I got was the API credits to use stuff like K2.5 and the amount of credits = the cost of the plan.

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johnfkngzoidberg@reddit

What are these logos?

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-dysangel-@reddit

yeah I mean Kimi's butthole is really weird looking

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JockY@reddit

😂

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TheOneNeartheTop@reddit

Some nice little bidet cleaning action at the bottom

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JockY@reddit

Amen. This new trend of using logos instead of words annoys the shit out of me. How am I supposed to know what squiggle one means vs squiggle two?? We have words for a reason!

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vambat@reddit

more impact for the meme but the top one looks like a mouse cursor

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gK_aMb@reddit

My brain LLM has not been trained to care or notice a flipped cursor.

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Leelaah_saiee@reddit

And we only have 26 alphabets

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TechnoByte_@reddit

Letters*

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DrewSaylor@reddit

Top is Cursor and the bottom is Kimi

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inigid@reddit

Seems like a shitty thing to do. I don't even understand why they would do it. What's the big deal with saying it is Kimi?

I just fine tuned a Qwen 3.5 Unsloth today for a project I'm working on. Who cares, why hide it?

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serhat_40@reddit

Cursor empfinde ich sowieso als Geldverschwendung..

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gK_aMb@reddit

Even Elon Musk has jumped into the roasting

Literally made 0 improvement to this news, did not need to know, or for him to be included as part of the summary.

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_wOvAN_@reddit

why drama? kimi license allowes

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Snoo_64233@reddit

2 of their employees accused Cursor of not contacting and paying fee and violating terms. They then deleted their accusation shortly after.

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nuclearbananana@reddit

I don't think they care about someone in the comments. There's a difference between violating terms and violating license.

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

Its more of a violating the spirit. If you distilled claude, you still trained the model and all that. Put in the work.

If you just host qwen and say it's your brand new LLM, you're just another reflection ai.

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llama-impersonator@reddit

it does look like a tuned checkpoint to me

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aeroumbria@reddit

Well, Moonshot was pretty much accused of being a "user" of Anthropic's model... I am not sure they should have anything to be ashamed of...

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SpeedOfSound343@reddit

So everyone is stealing from each other basically

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LagOps91@reddit

that's funny! they all are violating copyright left and right. but somehow this is where the line is drawn. what clowns! at least own it!

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LagOps91@reddit

true, but just because it's allowed, misleading others like that is a scummy move.

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emprahsFury@reddit

There's nothing wrong with white labeling a product that's intended to be white labeled. Now it's different when say a restaurant white labels mozzarella sticks and pretends they're bespoke to justify selling them for 3x what they paid. But this doesn't seem like that. Cursor did post train this.

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javasux@reddit

Then choose a different license

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ReadyAndSalted@reddit

If cursor makes more than $20m in revenue or has more than $100m users, then the license says they have to prominently display Kimi in the interface, which they're not doing.

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petuman@reddit

They could've arranged different license agreement with Moonshot?

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dysfunctionalbrat@reddit

Is it "one hundred million dollars users" or "one hundred million dollar users"?

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ReadyAndSalted@reddit

lmao whoops, I'll edit that second $ sign out

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WHO_IS_3R@reddit

it is one hundred million dollar user american bucks $

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Looobay@reddit

It's 100 million users

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KeyGlove47@reddit

easily over 20m MRR

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jellydn@reddit

It’s true, refer https://x.com/leerob/status/2035035355364081694?s=46&t=p6JV9tXBM_AUWryLj9du6g

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manofoz@reddit

My work is on a legacy pricing plan that is up for renewal soon but not soon enough. They just made all frontier models max mode only. Max mode just gives you the full context window, like 1M for Opus. It also charges you an insane amount of requests per prompt when enabled, we are taking $3-$20 prompts for Opi’s 4.6. Everyone in our chat are all excited about Composer-2, the timing was suspiciously close to them cutting us off from frontier.

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Aardvark_Says_What@reddit

> Even Elon Musk has jumped into the roasting

"Even"? That ketamine-roasted dipshit never misses an opportunity to jump in to The Drama De Jour.

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Technical-Earth-3254@reddit

Is this model unlimited in Cursors plan? I never got their pricing strategy

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LittleCraft1994@reddit

Nope its not for some right now its unlimited when selected auto but if you select a specific model api charge will be applied

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Technical-Earth-3254@reddit

Interesting, where's the advantage to just go byok with any other provider then? Just the harness?

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ilikehamburgers@reddit

Essentially they’re a wholesaler, buying tokens in bulk for a discount & selling them back to you at a price lower than what you’d pay at individual API rates but higher than what they bought them for. Main benefits being you get 3x the usage for the same price you’d get from byok and don’t have to deal with setting up accounts and keys across 5 different platforms.

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