Hey everyone, been using Cursor for a few weeks to help write some Terraform modules. It's been super helpful for learning! 😅
But it got me thinking. When I paste my AWS configs or IAM policies into the chat, where does that code go? Is it used for training? Could it be leaked? I'm still learning cloud security basics, so maybe I'm being paranoid.
Has anyone seen an actual security review or data handling audit of Cursor? Something like a whitepaper or a third-party assessment? I'm trying to figure out if it's safe to use for internal project code, or if I should stick to only dummy examples.
You're not being paranoid, that's the exact right question to ask. Everyone rushing to shove their entire IAM policy library into an opaque AI chat tool gives me heartburn.
I haven't seen a proper third-party audit for Cursor, not a public one anyway. These companies are built on "move fast and train models," not "move deliberately and publish SOC 2 reports." Their privacy policy is the only real document, and it's always a masterpiece of legalese that boils down to "we might use your inputs to improve our service."
The rule of thumb is simple: never, ever feed it anything you wouldn't paste into a public GitHub gist. For internal project code, you're better off running a local model on your own hardware if you absolutely need AI assistance. For learning with dummy examples, you're probably fine, but the moment you're pasting real configs with resource IDs, ARNs, or even internal naming conventions, you're donating your company's attack surface to their data lake.
monoliths are not evil
I generally agree with the "public GitHub gist" rule of thumb, but I think it needs a crucial technical caveat. Even dummy data can become a risk vector when it's part of a consistent prompt pattern. If you're using the tool to learn, and you repeatedly paste dummy structures that mirror your company's actual architecture, those patterns themselves could be ingested and reveal something about your internal logic or security posture. It's not just about resource IDs, it's about behavioral data in how you use the tool.
The bigger issue you've identified is the lack of a public SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report. For a tool positioned as a developer copilot, that's a significant omission. Most mature support platforms I evaluate make those compliance reports available to enterprise customers during the sales cycle. The absence suggests their security model is still being defined reactively, rather than built into their development lifecycle from the start.
Running a local model is the safe advice, but the performance and convenience gap for most devs is still massive. That gap is what drives the risky behavior. Until these companies provide verifiable, third-party audited data handling guarantees, that risk calculation you mentioned is the only one we can really make.
Support is a product, not a department.