Disabling all models and yet I can interact with an AI Agent

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

I disabled all the AI models, and yet I am able to interact with some agent in the chat window as if at least one model is enabled

Steps to Reproduce

Cursor → Settings → Cursor Settings → Models → View all models. Then I disabled all the models. Within Cursor Settings I went to Beta and ensured that Background Agent was disabled. Also within Cursor Settings I went to General and selected Privacy Mode (Legacy). I then quit cursor and re-opened it. All the settings were still as I had selected them, but I could still chat to the AI assistant through the chat window and proceed as if there was at least one AI model enabled.

Expected Behavior

It would inform me that all AI agents were turned off and would not allow me to interact with the AI agent via the chat as usual.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.3.5 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 9f33c2e793460d00cf95c06d957e1d1b8135fad0
Date: 2025-07-30T00:25:11.596Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Additional Information

The reason I am doing this is to understand what can be done in case some of our clients explicitly restrict the use of AI, or even only allow for some AI models to be used. Since cursor is still using one/a few AI models even when I have explicitly disabled all of them, it is an indication to me that I do not have control of which AI models are being used, and hence cannot use Cursor for many of my client projects.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

2

Hi @Rajiv_Krishnakumar and welcome to Cursor Forum.

Thank you for the detailed bug report.

Could you please share a screenshot how you use Cursor with AI Agent?
Likely the model you are using is Auto which is not a configurable model.

3

Hi @condor
Yes indeed it is on auto! I notice that when I have at least one model enabled, I can choose between auto or manually picking the model. However when none of them are on, then it automatically goes to auto and I cannot switch it off (when I click on the green button nothing happens)

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4

I have forwarded the report to our dev team. Thank you for the screenshot.

5

There is no error here. If you don’t have any models enabled, the auto mode remains by default. That’s how it was designed.

Another question is, why would you want to disable all models and the auto mode if the whole point of Cursor is to interact with models?

6

OK understood. The point is that currently there are some clients for which their data cannot leave certain jurisdictions, and it is not possible to really control that if any AI that is cloud-based is being used on the IDE directly, which is why I was wondering if there was a way, as I was working on some projects, to completely disable the AI in Cursor. But if that is not possible, then I can always just use another IDE for client projects.