Cognition denies SpaceX acquisition efforts and maintains independence in the AI coding market

Cognition, developer of the AI coding agent Devin, has denied reports that SpaceX is seeking to acquire the company. Chief executive Scott Wu moved quickly to refute a Bloomberg report, confirming on X that the company is not for sale and that the two parties have held no talks on the matter. The developments come as SpaceX seeks to catch up with intensifying competition against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, driven by a vision led by Elon Musk to strengthen his company's presence in the artificial intelligence sector.

News of the attempted acquisition of Cognition came just days after SpaceX completed a major 60 billion dollar acquisition of coding company Cursor.SpaceX had absorbed xAI earlier this year before staging an initial public offering in June that lifted its market valuation at its peak to around 2.3 trillion dollars. Although the company is promoting ambitious plans that include building data centres in space, xAI's business operations remain in their early stages compared to competitors, while also facing challenges tied to controversies around its Grok chatbot, such as the Mecha Hitler incident and non-consensual image generation issues, as it attempts to attract enterprise clients.

Musk estimates that artificial intelligence will account for roughly 99 percent of SpaceX's value within four to five years, a target that demands tangible commercial revenue. AI assistance software offers one of the clearest paths to rapid returns, as shown by Anthropic's fast growth driven by Claude Code. SpaceX and Cursor launched the Grok 4.6 model, which scored high marks in coding benchmarks and multi-step agentic tasks. Adding Cognition, alongside an enterprise client base that includes Mercedes-Benz, Citi, and Goldman Sachs, would have marked a further step toward strengthening this position in the enterprise coding market.

Market reports indicate that acquisition talks have stalled, while options for collaboration between the two companies to leverage compute capacity remain open.SpaceX makes its surplus computing capacity available to other technology companies, including Anthropic, until it can dedicate it entirely to its own systems, a detail Cognition's chief executive did not address in his statement. Cognition remains one of the largest independent companies in the coding space, having closed a 1 billion dollar funding round in late May that raised its valuation to 25 billion dollars, and is currently in early talks for a new round that could value it at up to 40 billion dollars.

The working environment at Cognition reflects an intense operating style not unlike Musk's management approach. The company acquired the assets of Windsurf last year after its founder and researchers moved to Google DeepMind in a 2.4 billion dollar talent and licensing deal, and mandated that remaining staff work more than 80 hours a week over six days in the office. Despite the pressures of expansion and securing compute resources, Cognition has so far maintained its commitment to independence, competing on its own against the generative model giants.