Meh, what’s the point if it’s got no privacy, which companies want to let OpenAI read your codebase? Cursor keeps winning because of privacy mode IMHO, there is no level of capability which outweighs privacy mode

Maybe I misunderstand you, but looking at their own documentation on the topic, I hardly see any advantage in terms of privacy when using Cursor Privacy Mode over OpenAIs Data Controls:

> OpenAI

> We rely on many of OpenAI's models to give AI responses. Requests may be sent to OpenAI even if you have an Anthropic (or someone else's) model selected in chat (e.g. for summarization)*. We have a zero data retention agreement with OpenAI.

Source: https://cursor.com/security

I will say that the Security page by the Cursor team is a very nice overview, even going into Auth, etc. and applaud that, but see nothing here that differentiates their use of e.g. OpenAI models from the agreements OpenAI offers themselves. Essentially, I don't see why anyone would have such severely heightened trust in Cursor over competitors in this area. If they only provided self hosted models, I could understand it, but not the way they operate.

Personally, both because of the way and on what LLMs have been trained on, on top of my expectation in terms of privacy, regardless of model provider assurances, I'd treat any LLM derived/assisted/reviewed code as public the second you send it to some providers server hosted model and some form of FOSS to boot. Basically, if you used Cursor, Codex, Augment or anything of that sort, I'd reduce any future privacy expectations straight away, might as well put it on public Github for everyone to see.

Only self-hosting on prem is an option for keeping control of your codebase, though personally, I'd still consider licensing such code as FOSS, considering no model wasn't trained on EUPL, GPL, etc. Personal (very much philosophical and not at all legal, as that goes into what training is, weights, etc. arguments that can go on eternal) opinion, but I'd argue whether you are MSFT or a small startup, if you derive a significant amount of new code from LLMs, arguing that copyleft shouldn't be at the very least on the mind of your legal department isn't reasonable, but of course, this will have to be decided by courts and likely in favour of those with the best legal teams. I doubt if any of the "80% of our code is written by LLMs" were true, that'd convince a court to enforce copyleft upon the product in question, but personally, that'd be my viewpoint.

Regardless of licensing, if you send your code to Cursor, purely privacy wise, you shouldn't have reservations about OpenAI.