I’m a developer from China and an annual subscriber (since September 2024). Over the past year, new AI-coding tools have sprung up one after another, yet until lunchtime today I’d been happily and steadfastly using Cursor—until I received a region-restriction warning.
I spent the whole afternoon trying to stay on Cursor. What puzzles me most is this: although Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and the like officially don’t serve mainland China, anyone who knows how to “use science” (you know what I mean) can still access their services. Cursor, however, is the only place where even a VPN doesn’t help. Your engineers must be incredible—your block is stricter than that of the LLM providers themselves. I honestly have no idea how you pulled it off.
In short, you’ve succeeded in driving away Chinese users who can otherwise pay for and normally use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini via VPNs. They will now request refunds, stop renewing, and—angry—promote your competitors instead.
So why do this? Why impose restrictions even tighter than your underlying model providers?
Why not take a page from your own suppliers?
One last bit of news: after Jensen Huang bent over backwards to get the H20 sold in China, Nvidia’s market cap jumped $160 billion overnight.
