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It was a mistake that was ahead of its time.

Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group were trying to dial in a new electric arc furnace for a steelmaker when they noticed something odd. The carbon electrodes, rather than breaking down, were growing larger. 

The team had inadvertently created what’s known as a pyrolysis reaction, which is basically burning something in the absence of oxygen. In this case, the furnace was splitting methane into pure hydrogen and pure carbon. The team reported their discovery internally and then, basically, forgot about it.

“Back then, nobody cared because nobody cared about methane pyrolysis, about hydrogen,” Massimiliano Pieri, CEO of Tulum Energy, told TechCrunch. The experiment was largely forgotten for the next 20 years.

But a couple of years ago, investors for the Techint Group’s corporate VC arm, TechEnergy Ventures, were scouring the landscape for new ways to produce hydrogen from methane without the usual pollution.

Techint’s investors didn’t have to look far. “Someone in the company realized, ‘But we already have that. We have this discovery,’” Pieri said.

So the conglomerate dusted off the idea and spun out Tulum to turn the accidental discovery into a viable business. Recently, Tulum closed an oversubscribed $27 million seed round led by TDK Ventures and CDP Venture Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, MITO Tech Ventures, and TechEnergy Ventures participated.

Tulum isn’t the only startup pursuing methane pyrolysis as a way to produce hydrogen. Modern Hydrogen, Molten Industries, and Monolith are among Tulum’s competitors. The reaction has attracted attention for its ability to produce hydrogen from cheap, widely available natural gas without any carbon dioxide emissions. In pyrolysis, methane is broken down in the absence of oxygen, the only products are hydrogen gas and a dust of solid carbon, both of which can be sold.

But Tulum differs in a few ways. For one, it doesn’t need to use expensive catalysts to encourage the pyrolysis reaction, which some of its competitors require. In its use of the electric arc furnace, Tulum is also using a widely used — if modified — technology.

“This gives you a big head start,” Pieri said.

Tulum will use the seed funding to build a pilot plant in Mexico alongside an existing Techint Group steel plant. If all goes well, the steel plant could buy hydrogen and carbon directly from Tulum for use in its operations.

Pieri said that at full-scale production, a commercial plant would generate two tons of hydrogen and 600 tons of carbon per day.

Tulum is hoping its commercial scale plant will produce one kilogram of hydrogen for about $1.50 in the U.S., where electricity and natural gas are both cheap. At that price, it’s just 50 cents more than most hydrogen made from natural gas today, and it significantly undercuts some of the leading green hydrogen methods. That’s before the company sells any carbon that its process generates.

Not bad for an almost forgotten mistake.

The CEO of Anysphere, the company behind the popular AI-powered coding environment Cursor, apologized Friday for a poorly communicated pricing change to its $20-per-month Pro plan. The changes resulted in some users complaining that they unexpectedly faced additional costs.

“We recognize that we didn’t handle this pricing rollout well and we’re sorry,” said Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. “Our communication was not clear enough and came as a surprise to many of you.”

Truell is referring to a June 16 update to Cursor’s Pro plan. Instead of Pro users getting 500 fast responses on advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and then unlimited responses at a slower rate, the company announced subscribers would now get $20 worth of usage per month, billed at API rates. The new plan allows users to run coding tasks in Cursor with their AI model of choice until they hit the $20 limit, and then users have to purchase additional credits to continue using it.

However, Pro users took to social media to file their complaints in the weeks following the announcement.

Many users said they ran out of requests in Cursor rather quickly under the new plan, in some cases after just a few prompts when using Anthropic’s new Claude models, which are particularly popular for coding. Other users claimed they were unexpectedly charged additional costs, not fully understanding they’d be charged extra if they ran over the $20 usage limit and had not set a spend limit. In the new plan, only Cursor’s “auto mode,” which routes to AI models based on capacity, offers unlimited usage for Pro users.

Anysphere says it plans to refund users that were unexpectedly charged, and aims to be more clear about pricing changes moving forward. The company declined TechCrunch’s request for comment beyond the blog post.

Truell notes in the blog that Anysphere changed Cursor’s pricing because “new models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks” — meaning that some of the latest AI models have become more expensive, spending a lot of time and computational resources to complete complicated, multi-step tasks. Cursor was eating those costs under its old Pro plan, but now, it’s passing them along to users.

While many AI models have lowered in price, the cutting edge of performance continues to be expensive — in some cases, more pricey than ever. Anthropic’s recently launched Claude Opus 4 model is $15 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire “Lord of The Rings” series) and $75 per million output tokens. That’s even more costly than Google’s launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its most expensive AI model ever.

In recent months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for “priority” access to AI models — an additional premium on top of what AI models already cost that guarantees reliable, high speed performance.

These expenses may be filtering their way down to AI coding tools, which seem to be getting more expensive across the industry. Users of another popular AI tool, Replit, were also caught off guard in recent weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive.

Cursor has become one of the most successful AI products on the market, reaching more than $500 million in ARR largely through subscriptions to its Pro plan. However, Cursor now faces intense competition from the AI providers it relies on, while simultaneously figuring out how to affordably serve their more expensive AI models.

Anthropic’s recently launched AI coding tool Claude Code has been a hit with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company’s ARR to $4 billion, and likely taking some users from Cursor in the process. Last week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic employees that led product development of Claude Code.

But if Cursor intends to keep its market-leading position, it can’t stop working with the state-of-the-art model providers — at least, not until its own home-grown models are more reasonably competitive.

So Anysphere recently struck multi-year deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to offer a $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan with very high rate limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan also told TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time.

However, it certainly feels as if the pressure between Cursor and AI model developers is building.

Electronic Arts and BioWare will sunset their online multiplayer game Anthem on January 12, effectively making it obsolete. “Anthem was designed to be an online-only title so once the servers go offline, the game will no longer be playable,” BioWare wrote in the announcement. On August 15, the game will disappear from EA Play’s playlist.

Right now, players can’t buy in-game currency, but they will be able to spend what they have until servers are offline. Developers at BioWare who have been working on Anthem will not be laid off as a result of the game’s end. News of the game’s shutdown comes as the industry, already going through an upheaval, faces increased pressure from players to create “end of life” plans for service games.

Anthem’s development lasted almost seven years, during which the game struggled through major redirections. Its 2019 launch was widely panned by critics, who described it as uneven in its execution, riddled with bugs, and tedious. While BioWare and EA had initially planned to overhaul the game after launch—an undertaking known as Anthem Next—BioWare canceled the project in 2021, citing Covid-19, to shift focus to other games. Its live service continued to run.

Online, fans on places like EA’s official forums are asking for an “offline mode” that would allow them to play Anthem even without the servers. “To shut down and completely remove a game people have put money into (especially without refunds) is a worrying and dangerous precedent,” one player wrote. “If you bought a game you should be able to play it.” Another player wrote that “letting games like Anthem disappear completely also sends a dangerous message: that live-service games are disposable, no matter how much time or money players invested.”

Video games disappear for many reasons, whether it’s licensing issues, code being lost, or physical media becoming unplayable. The developer’s decision to end Anthem’s server support speaks to a problem specifically being combated by Stop Killing Games, a consumer movement out of the European Union that argues this practice is destroying some titles unnecessarily. “An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods—with no stated expiration date—but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends,” the campaign’s website reads. This practice, the movement’s organizers claim, “is not only detrimental to customers but makes preservation effectively impossible.”

Stop Killing Games won’t be able to do anything to stop the demise of Anthem. The organization relies on petitions and tries to seek government intervention—actions that couldn’t achieve outcomes before January. Still, says founder Ross Scott, the sunsetting is “exactly the sort we’re trying to prevent.” The goal is to “break the cycle so this doesn’t keep happening for future games.”

For Scott and the other adherents of Stop Killing Games, destroying a video game—much like destroying every copy of a book, album, or film—is tantamount to “a cultural loss for society,” according to the group’s website. “While a less recognized medium, video games still deserve to have basic protections against the complete and willful destruction of many of its works.” What they want is for companies to have backup plans that allow games to live on in a playable format even if they have to be taken offline.