During the excavation of tunnel boring machine (TBM), surrounding rock with different surface joint conditions will be encountered, which will affect the selection of operation parameters and construction efficiency of TBM. To study the influence of joint conditions on the cutter force, three kinds of scheme of rock linear cutting were set up in this research. During the experiment, the rock face failure was observed, the rock slag was collected and the cutter force and vibration signals of rock breaking process were recorded. The influences of penetration, joint spacing and joint angle on rock breaking were analyzed from rock mass failure and cutter vibration. The results show that the cutter force increases with the deeper penetration. And the rock sample with 400 mm joint spacing requires larger force than that with 200 mm joint spacing, but the rock breaking effect is poor. Compared with parallel jointed rock samples, inclined jointed rock samples require lower force and have better rock breaking effect. On this basis, a prediction model of cutter force is established through multiple linear regression method, which takes penetration, joint spacing and joint angle as independent variables. It shows that the prediction model has high accuracy.