Key facts
- Elon Musk admitted xAI's Grok AI model is less advanced than Anthropic's latest offerings.
- Musk called Anthropic the current leader in AI with no rivals matching its top models.
- Grok 4.5 scored 53% on the DeepSWE 1.1 coding benchmark, lagging behind Anthropic's models.
- SpaceX has a compute agreement with Anthropic for hundreds of megawatts of power.
- Musk expects xAI to reach frontier-level AI performance by 2027.
- Musk stated Grok 4.7 is not as good as Anthropic's Opus 5.5.
Elon Musk has publicly admitted that his artificial intelligence company xAI's model, Grok, is not as advanced as rival Anthropic's latest offerings. In a rare display of humility, Musk stated that Anthropic is the current leader in the AI landscape, with no other models matching its capabilities.
Grok 4.5, launched on July 8, 2026, was intended to be a significant leap forward, priced competitively at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. However, benchmark scores indicate that Grok 4.5 lags behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, particularly in coding tasks where Grok 4.5 achieved only 53% on the DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark.
Musk attributed the disparity to xAI's three years of operation compared to Anthropic's six years. Despite the competitive gap, Musk is also partnering with Anthropic, with SpaceX securing a major compute agreement for hundreds of megawatts of power from xAI's Colossus facilities. Musk has pledged to maintain a level playing field for AI infrastructure access.
Musk's strategy to close the gap involves integrating Grok across Tesla and SpaceX, while allowing teams to use more effective models when necessary. He expressed optimism that xAI will reach frontier-level performance by 2027, though he acknowledged Anthropic's continued progress with models like Opus 5.5.
In a separate interview, Musk stated that Grok 4.7 is not as good as Opus 5.5, but expects to catch up "sometime next year." He also praised Chinese AI labs for their performance per unit of compute and suggested a US-China "working committee" for AI regulation.