Cursor builds AI agent 'Sand' to rival Anthropic's Claude Cowork

Cursor is making a bold push into the productivity space with an AI agent codenamed Sand, aimed squarely at non-developers. The tool, currently in development, will be designed more toward general consumers, as it will be capable of managing everyday tasks like emails, texts, and document processing, which would make it a direct competitor to emerging services such as Anthropic's Claude Cowork.

According to sources that spoke to The Information, the new AI agent codenamed "Sand" is designed as a general-purpose AI assistant, rather than a code-specific or development tool. This shift marks a significant pivot for Cursor, which has built its foothold in the market as a leading AI-powered code editor. The company is seemingly now looking to broaden its reach and tap into a wider user base that's beyond the developer community, which seems to be the general direction of many AI companies.

With Sand, Cursor is aiming to offer a personalized assistant that handles office productivity workflows, from managing spreadsheets to summarizing lengthy documents. The product could disrupt the market currently being dominated by Anthropic's Claude Cowork, which enables a user to outline a set of tasks for Claude to complete without any human input.

An example of a job Cowork could complete would be scanning your email and generating a report outlining the most pressing emails you need to reply to, and scheduling a time into your Google Calendar for when you can read the draft replies it has generated for each of those replies.

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Sand comes on the heels of SpaceX's pending acquisition of Cursor for $60 billion, which The Information reports could influence whether Sand will ever come to market, or when Cursor intends to release it.