Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue with the CLI agent, and the team is aware of it and tracking it.
A couple things to try:
Temporarily disable MCP servers
The CLI agent loads the MCP config from the same files as the IDE, and a stuck MCP server can block startup completely. Try renaming the config to rule this out:
mv ~/.cursor/mcp.json ~/.cursor/mcp.json.bak
If you also have a project .cursor/mcp.json, rename that too. Then run agent again.
Share your cursor-agent version
agent --version
If it works without MCP, that helps narrow it down. If it still hangs, we can dig in further.
Also, there’s a known interaction between iTerm2 and the CLI on macOS Apple Silicon. If disabling MCP doesn’t help, try running agent from the standard Terminal.app and see if anything changes.