Cursor Router Launches

• On 22 July 2026 Cursor said Auto mode is now powered by Cursor Router, an "intelligent model router" that analyses each request and sends it to the right model: frontier models for demanding work, price-efficient ones for the rest^[1]
• Cursor's blog describes it as a classifier trained on 600,000+ live requests that weighs query, context, task complexity and domain plus what it knows of each model's behaviour, and is cache-aware in training and evaluation^[5]
• Cursor says it routes hundreds of millions of coding requests a week and that roughly 60% of its developers stick to one daily-driver model, which it argues means routine work gets done at frontier prices^[5]

Notable features

• Three optimization modes under Auto: Intelligence (frontier quality), Balance (the quality most people daily-drive) and Cost (good quality, optimizing token spend); Balance and Intelligence bill at the routed model's rate^[1]
• Admins can enable it per team or group, restrict modes, set the default, allow or block underlying models, show or hide the routed model (hidden by default), and enforce Auto softly or hard; Grok 4.5 is required as a price-efficient routing option^[1]
• Cursor reports 30-50% lower cost at frontier performance in early access with dozens of enterprises and 60% savings in online A/B tests over millions of requests^[5]; the forum post quotes 31-52% savings with no drop in keep rate^[4]
• Not in Cursor's own changelog: an outside write-up says Cost keeps the old bundled per-token Auto pricing while Balance and Intelligence average about twice the price of Cost, with Cursor-published per-commit figures of $4.63 (Balance) and $6.76 (Intelligence)^[2]
• Available on desktop, web, iOS, CLI and the SDK; on by default for Teams, enabled from the dashboard by Enterprise admins; the launch was aimed at teams and enterprises, not individual plans^[1][3][5]
• One forum commenter objected that Auto used to mean a cheap flat rate and the rollout wording was unclear, a sign of the pricing change users noticed^[4]