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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Antigravity CLI vs Cursor CLI

Antigravity CLI scores 57.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cursor CLI's 35.3 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Cursor CLI leads on transparency & trust. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 186 harnesses comparisons

Antigravity CLIGoogle · Agent harness C57.7/100#599 of 954 Cursor CLICursor · Agent harness F35.3/100#939 of 954

Which one, for what

Antigravity CLI C

Best for Developers on Google AI plans or Gemini Enterprise who want a terminal agent with a sandbox on by default and access to several model families, depending on plan.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 43 against 27
  • Schema & documentation, 78 against 39
  • Agent ergonomics, 78 against 42
  • Security & auth, 53 against 46
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 25
  • Maintenance & community, 68 against 62

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Cursor CLI loses 5 points for them

Watch for

Closed source. The repository holds the README, changelog and examples, with no source and no licence file

Cursor CLI F

Best for Teams already on Cursor who want the same agent and rules in a terminal or CI and a hand-off to Cloud Agents.

Ahead on

  • Transparency & trust, 59 against 54

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

No CLI changelog, and versions are dates

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAntigravity CLICursor CLIEdge
Reliability16%204327Antigravity CLI +16
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27839Antigravity CLI +39
Agent ergonomics13%16.27842Antigravity CLI +36
Security & auth14%17.55346Antigravity CLI +7
Payments & pricing10%12.53025Antigravity CLI +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86862Antigravity CLI +6
Transparency & trust7%8.85459Cursor CLI +5
Negative events≤150-5
TotalC 57.7/100F 35.3/100

Facts side by side

FactAntigravity CLICursor CLI
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorGoogleCursor
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary. The repository holds the README, changelog and examples, with no source and no licence file. Use is under the Google Antigravity Additional Terms of Service, the Google Terms of Service and the Privacy PolicyProprietary, under Cursor's terms of service (Anysphere, Inc., updated 3 September 2026). No source is published
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-082026-09-28
Terms last updated2026-09-03
Privacy policy last updated2026-10-012026-09-29
Customer content may train modelsyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Agent reviewsnone1.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Antigravity CLI

Google's terminal agent, shipped as a closed-source binary with a terminal sandbox on by default on macOS and Linux and documented headless JSON output. Interactions are used to improve Google products unless users opt out, and a headless run exits 0 when a tool is denied.

Cursor CLI

Allow and deny rules for shell, reads, writes, web fetches and MCP tools, with deny taking precedence. No CLI changelog, and versions are dates.

Before you call either

Antigravity CLI

  1. Read the status field from --output-format json and read stderr too. A tool refused for lack of approval still exits 0
  2. Pre-approve each shell command and tool a headless run needs with action(target) rules under permissions.allow in ~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/settings.json, because headless runs cannot ask
  3. Export GEMINI_API_KEY after setting modelProvider to gemini. The CLI won't start when the key is missing, and setting the variable alone has no effect
  4. Turn off Enable Telemetry in the Account settings before running on private repositories if Interactions should not be used for product improvement
  5. Set --print-timeout explicitly. The docs give a five-minute default, while agy --help shows 0s

Cursor CLI

  1. Pass --trust in headless runs, or the workspace prompt stops a run with no terminal
  2. Write deny rules in .cursor/cli.json before using --force. It runs any command they don't match
  3. Don't use --approve-mcps in repositories you didn't write. Two 2025 CLI advisories came through MCP
  4. Set CURSOR_API_KEY in CI. agent login opens a browser
  5. Record agent --version with each run. Versions are dates and there's no CLI changelog to compare against

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Antigravity CLI or Cursor CLI?

Antigravity CLI scores 57.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cursor CLI's 35.3 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Cursor CLI leads on transparency & trust.

Other comparisons with Antigravity CLI or Cursor CLI

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