Cursor agent keeps resuming work after being stopped

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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I’m using Cursor’s Auto/ balanced agent with a Goal. After pausing the Goal and clicking the Stop button, the agent appears to stop working for a few minutes. However, it then resumes working automatically without any input from me.

This happens repeatedly: no matter how many times I click Stop, the agent eventually resumes the work again.

Actual behavior:
The agent stops temporarily, then automatically resumes after a few minutes. Clicking Stop again only stops it temporarily, and the cycle repeats.

Steps to Reproduce

I’m using Cursor’s Auto/ balanced agent with a Goal. After pausing the Goal and clicking the Stop button, the agent appears to stop working for a few minutes. However, it then resumes working automatically without any input from me.

Expected Behavior

Once I pause the Goal and stop the agent, it should remain stopped until I explicitly resume it.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 3.20.21
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: f09fca384ceca23f7bf21f9c23655b162641d740
Date: 2026-09-13T19:02:51.781Z
Layout: IDE
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 42.10.0
Chromium: 148.0.7778.280
Node.js: 24.18.1
V8: 14.8.178.38-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.291
OS: Darwin arm64 25.6.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Auto balanced

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey @Or_Groman, thanks for the report.

What you’re seeing is two things working together. Stop ends the current turn, but any terminal commands the agent has already started in the background keep running. When one of them finishes, it wakes the chat back up, and that wake-up also resumes a paused Goal so the agent can act on the result. With a Goal set, the agent picks the objective back up a few minutes later, which matches exactly what you described. This is a known issue we’re already tracking, and I’ve added your report to it.

To make it stay stopped for now:

  1. Hover over the Goal row above the chat input (the line with the target icon and your objective).
  2. Click the trash icon on the right to clear the Goal. Pausing alone is not enough here, since a finishing background task resumes it.
  3. Open the Terminal panel and close (trash icon) any terminals the agent left running in the background.
  4. Click Stop if the agent is still generating.

After that the agent stays idle until you send a new message, and you can set a new Goal whenever you want it to work autonomously again.

If it still resumes after clearing the Goal, let me know and please include a screenshot of the area above the chat input at that moment!