Elon Musk has publicly acknowledged that the Grok AI model, developed by xAI, currently trails behind the offerings of Anthropic. Musk identified Anthropic as the industry leader, noting that his previous assessment of the company's position in the AI race was incorrect.
The Grok 4.5 model was released on July 8, 2026, with pricing set at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Performance benchmarks indicate that Grok 4.5 underperforms compared to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, particularly in coding tasks where it achieved a score of 53% on the DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark.
Musk attributed the performance gap to the difference in operational history: xAI has been active for approximately three years, whereas Anthropic has been developing its research and architecture for six years. He expects xAI to reach frontier-level performance by 2027, despite the ongoing advancements of Anthropic models like Opus 5.5.
Beyond competition, the companies have established a partnership. SpaceX has entered into a compute agreement with Anthropic, providing access to hundreds of megawatts of power from the Colossus data center facilities. Musk stated that he intends to keep AI infrastructure access equitable for competitors.
To accelerate development, Musk is integrating Grok into internal workflows at Tesla and SpaceX. Employees at these companies maintain the flexibility to utilize alternative models if they prove more effective for specific operational tasks.
