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Welcome to Next in Dev

What's up, everyone? Welcome to Next in Dev, your weekly rundown of modern web dev news. This week, OpenAI killed Sora a day after publishing its safety blog post, Cursor's "in-house" model turned out to be built on a Chinese open-source model, a federal judge called the Pentagon's Anthropic ban an attempt to "cripple" the company, and Next.js finally addressed its biggest criticism.

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OpenAI is shutting down Sora. The app, the API, and the website are all scheduled to go dark, though no timeline yet. Disney found out 30 minutes after a working session with OpenAI, and the $1 billion deal between the two is dead. Downloads had dropped 45%, the app made just $2.1 million total, and multiple reports cite Anthropic's Claude Code as the competitive pressure pushing OpenAI toward enterprise. Publishing a safety blog post the day before announcing the shutdown is peak OpenAI.

Cursor's Composer 2 is built on Kimi K2.5. Cursor launched it as "frontier-level" without mentioning the base model. A developer found Kimi’s tokens in the API responses within hours. Cursor confirmed it, said ~25% of compute came from the Kimi base, and acknowledged the omission was "a miss." The model's license requires prominent attribution above $20M/month, and Cursor reportedly clears $160M/month. The engineering on top is real, but the premise wasn't.

A federal judge called the Pentagon's Anthropic ban "troubling." Judge Rita Lin said the supply chain risk designation looks like punishment for Anthropic's refusal to allow Claude for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The government's lawyer conceded the ban doesn't stop contractors from using Anthropic on non-military work, which walks back Hegseth's public statements. What a mess! Ruling expected in days.

GitHub Copilot will use your data for AI training starting April 24. Free, Pro, and Pro+ users are opted in by default. Inputs, outputs, code snippets, file names, repo structure, and suggestion feedback are all included. Business and Enterprise are excluded. Check your settings under Privacy before the deadline. After April 24, opting out only prevents future collection.

Next.js shipped a stable Adapter API. Any hosting provider can now build against a typed, versioned contract for full Next.js deployment, including streaming, Server Components, PPR, caching, and more. Vercel's own adapter uses the same public API with no private hooks. Adapters for Netlify, Cloudflare, and AWS via OpenNext are in development. A formal Ecosystem Working Group with public meeting notes is now in place. This directly addresses the Vercel lock-in criticism and is worth a serious second look if that's been holding you back.

Figma opened its canvas to AI agents with write access via MCP and a new "skills" system for encoding design conventions as markdown. Free during beta.

Also this week:

Payload CMS v3.80.0 added multi-tenant slug uniqueness control plus Drizzle, Postgres, SQLite, and Lexical fixes.
WebStorm 2026.1 enabled the service-powered TypeScript engine by default and added multi-agent AI chat via ACP.
TanStack DB v0.6 added SQLite-backed persistence, hierarchical data projection with includes, and reactive effects. Seeking SSR design partners for v1.
TanStack removed third-party ads. Its homepage Lighthouse score went from 37 to 80, total transfer from 13.1 MiB to 830 KiB, and third-party domains from 17 to 3.
Claude Code v2.1.79–2.1.84 across five releases: transcript search, --bare scripting mode, rate limit display, PowerShell tool preview, and MCP deduplication.
Railway redesigned its dashboard, added DNS management for Railway-purchased domains, raw query support for all databases, and Claude-powered deploy diagnostics.

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What did I miss? There’s so much happening in modern web dev that I know I missed something. Please share your thoughts in the comments or reply to this email. I want to address your suggestions and may include them in future newsletters.

Thanks for reading. See you next time.