SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its first AI model built with Cursor after $60bn acquisition

SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its first model with Cursor

SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.5, the first model built with Cursor since the $60bn takeover. Elon Musk calls it "Opus-class" but cheaper, and pitches it at coders and Wall Street rather than chatbot users. SpaceXAI has launched Grok 4.5, its most capable model yet. It is the company's first release since going public and buying the AI coding startup Cursor. This is the joint model the two firms had raced to ship. Elon Musk aimed it squarely at coding and agentic work, not casual chat. "It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost," Musk wrote on X. The line name-checks Anthropic's top Opus family. A chart with the announcement claims Grok 4.5 beats Opus 4.8 on several benchmarks, Axios first reported. Built for coders, and for Wall Street Grok 4.5 was trained alongside Cursor, which SpaceX agreed to buy in a deal valuing the startup at $60bn. The model is built to "handle difficult, long-running tasks," according to the company's blog post, including software engineering. Unlike Cursor's earlier models, it also targets legal and financial work, and adds cybersecurity features, Bloomberg reported. The finance push is deliberate. Musk said this year that his AI unit, known as xAI before it merged with SpaceX, had fallen behind on coding. The company has since rebuilt the team and chased Wall Street clients for its Grok chatbot. Grok 4.5 is the clearest sign yet of that pivot towards paying business customers. The price play Cost is the pitch. SpaceXAI priced Grok 4.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Anthropic's Opus 4.8 runs at $5 and $25, while OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna sits at $1 and $6. That undercuts the priciest rivals as companies watch their token spend more closely. The company concedes limits. It says Grok 4.5 beats some OpenAI and Anthropic models on speed, price and performance. It does not beat their largest and latest. Musk expects to close that gap soon. The model is live now in Grok Build, in Cursor on all plans, and via the SpaceXAI console. A wider public release is due Thursday. It is not yet available in the EU. Why it matters The release lands on a crowded day. OpenAI is rolling out GPT-5.6 widely on Thursday, alongside a new set of voice models. That comes after the Trump administration asked it to stagger the launch. Government scrutiny hangs over all of it, with regulators watching new models for cybersecurity risk. Cursor said it has taken steps to "detect and block bad actors" while preserving legitimate security research. There is a twist in how Grok 4.5 was built. SpaceXAI trained it on the same compute it leases to rivals Anthropic and Google. As its own models grow hungrier, it will have to choose. It can feed them, or rent that capacity out for cash. For now, Musk is betting a cheaper, coder-friendly Grok can win business, even while it trails the best models on raw power.

New Name, New Grok: SpaceXAI Officially Ties Its Brand to the World's Most Problematic Chatbot

The federal government managed to temporarily ban Anthropic's latest AI model from being used by foreign nationals and reportedly held up the release of OpenAI's updated GPT-5.6 Sol for security concerns, but it seems the latest version of Grok must have just skated right through. Grok 4.5, the first release of an AI model under the newly formed SpaceXAI, was made available to the public on Wednesday. Elon Musk's rocket/social media/AI company claims Grok 4.5 is its "smartest model built to excel at coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work." Notably, it's also the first release the company has made since partnering with AI coding company Cursor. In particular, SpaceXAI said its latest model "excels at real engineering tasks" and is "equally adept at office work," and claimed it compares favorably to other leading models in those areas. Despite that, Grok still seems behind on most major benchmarks. It trails both Claude's Fable 5 -- the "safe" version of its super-powerful Mythos model -- and OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which is now no longer that company's flagship option, anyway. In most of the testing metrics, Grok 4.5 scores on par with Anthropic's Opus 4.8, which is a couple of months old at this point. The calling card for Grok, though, appears to be efficiency and cost. "It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient, and lower cost," Musk wrote in a post on X. To that end, the company claims that Grok 4.5 costs about $2 per one million input tokens and $6 per one million output tokens. By comparison, according to The Decoder, Opus 4.8 runs at $5 for inputs and $25 for outputs. Fable, Anthropic's big hitter, costs $10 for input and $50 for output on that same one-million-token scale. "Cheap" probably isn't a word anyone would typically associate with SpaceX, but, in general, Grok is kind of a square peg in a round hole. SpaceX has managed to keep itself clean of the Elon Musk stink even as he drives his own personal brand into the ground, but associating with Grok is going to be a real test of the brand's strength. It's tough to get roped into being linked to an AI model that is at this point best known for producing non-consensual nude images, including those of children, at a scale never before achieved -- a pretty dubious honor if ever there was one. Since Grok seemingly didn't get caught up by government review, Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, all Cursor plans, and from the SpaceXAI console starting today.

Elon Musk says 'Opus-class' Grok 4.5 is about to launch

Talk about jumping on the bandwagon at the very last minute. On Wednesday, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk announced that the new version of the company's AI chatbot, Grok 4.5, will be released to the public on Thursday, July 9. "Based on strong positive feedback from customers in our beta test program, @SpaceXAI will make Grok 4.5 available to the public tomorrow. It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost," wrote Musk in a post on X. The recently renamed AI/social networking/data-centers-in-space company is currently testing Grok 4.5 as private beta, while the stable version of the LLM is currently Grok 4.3. Musk calls the new Grok "Opus-class" in reference to the company's competitor Anthropic, whose general-purpose model, Claude Opus, is currently at version 4.6. Anthropic's most powerful model, Fable 5, has only recently been reinstated for users after being pulled following an intervention from the U.S. government. Meanwhile, OpenAI's powerful GPT-5.6 model is also launching on Thursday, following a short-lived launch ban from the White House.

Elon Musk says Grok 4.5 to launch on July 9, calls it 'Opus-class'

xAI is speeding up development amid the race for the fastest and cheapest model in the AI space. Grok 4.5 first surfaced in private beta at Tesla and SpaceX in June, with Musk putting its early performance close to, and potentially above, Anthropic's Claude Opus. Elon Musk announced on X on Wednesday that xAI will release Grok 4.5, its latest large language model (LLM), to the public on July 9. "It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost," he wrote. xAI is speeding up development amid the race for the fastest and cheapest model in the AI space. Grok 4.5 first surfaced in private beta at Tesla and SpaceX in June, with Musk putting its early performance close to, and potentially above, Anthropic's Claude Opus. None of Musk's performance claims have been independently benchmarked yet; they are based on internal testing at Tesla and SpaceX rather than public evaluations. Grok 4.5 runs on a new 1.5-trillion-parameter foundation model known as V9, with supplemental training on data from the AI coding platform Cursor to sharpen its technical and coding chops. SpaceX is in the process of acquiring Cursor in a $60 billion deal. The release comes under the SpaceXAI banner, the name xAI being adopted after the organisation was folded into SpaceX earlier this year. The latest model would follow Grok 4, launched in July 2025. The company has mapped out a roadmap of monthly model releases through the rest of 2026, Musk had said in June. The release puts Grok 4.5 on a collision course with OpenAI, which is moving its GPT-5.6 models toward broader availability around the same period. This sets up another head-to-head moment in a race already crowded with players such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

SpaceX Readies Expansion of Grok AI Model | PYMNTS.com

Grok 4.5 will become available to the public Thursday (July 9), SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on the company-owned social media platform X early Wednesday (July 8). "It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost," Musk wrote. The trillionaire had announced late last month that the model had entered private beta testing at SpaceX and Tesla, saying it could rival Anthropic's Claude Opus. A report Wednesday on the rollout from Seeking Alpha, citing Apptopia data, notes that the number of average daily users for the Grok app has fallen 28% since April. The app's market share was at 8.7% last month, down from 10.6% in May, the report added, while OpenAI's ChatGPT held the top ranking among American market share in June. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that SpaceX had developed a handset-style AI device and shown the prototype to investors before going public. The device, said to be slimmer than an iPhone, was built to run on a proprietary operating system and integrates AI technology from SpaceX's xAI, sources told the news outlet. Musk later denied the report, calling it "utterly false" in a post on X, leading to a drop in SpaceX's share price. PYMNTS wrote last week about the potential behind such a device, pointing out that SpaceX controls Starlink, a satellite network with global coverage, and is building direct-to-cell service that allows phones to connect to satellites without a terrestrial carrier. And SpaceX's merger with xAI in February, a deal said to value the combined company at around $1.25 trillion, gives it direct access to Grok. "A consumer device connecting to all three would give SpaceX a hardware endpoint that bypasses both the app stores and cellular carriers," the report said, adding that no existing AI advice offers that combination. "SpaceX went public in June in a record-setting initial public offering (IPO)," the report added. "A public company's investor narrative carries different weight than a private one. A phone-shaped slot in the IPO pitch deck, with xAI models inside and Qualcomm silicon underneath, frames SpaceX as a vertical platform company rather than a launch and connectivity provider." The report also noted the uneven track record of AI devices. "From Google Glass to the Humane AI Pin, the pattern is consistent. Consumers don't adopt hardware because it's futuristic," PYMNTS wrote. "They adopt it because it solves a problem better than what they already carry.

SpaceX to make Grok 4.5 available to public tomorrow, Musk says By Investing.com

Investing.com-- SpaceX will make its Grok 4.5 artificial intelligence model available to the public tomorrow, CEO Elon Musk said in a social media post on Tuesday evening. Musk described the model as "Opus-class", comparing it to Anthropic's Claude, but said it was "faster, more token-efficient and lower cost." Get more breaking news on the biggest AI stocks by subscribing to InvestingPro Grok is the flagship AI model of Musk's xAI, which was folded into SpaceX this year and recently renamed to SpaceXAI. XAI had last released Grok 4.3 in April, with Musk having long teased the next version of his flagship AI. Musk had earlier in July said Grok 4.5 had entered private beta testing at SpaceX and Tesla, and that the model was built on xAI's new 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 foundation model.