Musk announces SpaceXAI public launch of Claude rival Grok 4.5
Elon Musk says it's an “Opus-class model.”
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- Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will release Grok 4.5 publicly on July 9, 2026, after two weeks of testing.
- Musk claims Grok 4.5 matches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 while being faster, cheaper, and more token-efficient.
- Claude Opus is widely used for advanced coding and knowledge work, making Grok 4.5’s claimed performance commercially significant.
- The launch comes as OpenAI plans to release GPT-5.6, intensifying competition among leading AI model providers.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
After only 2 weeks of testing, Elon Musk is so confident that Grok 4.5 is superior to Anthropic’s Claude Opus that he’s releasing the AI model tomorrow.
SpaceX (now renamed SpaceXAI) has been testing Musk’s latest AI model, Grok 4.5, internally for just under 2 weeks and is now confident that it can be used by the public.
The release, planned for July 9th, 2026, is going ahead “based on strong positive feedback from…(the) beta test program,” Musk said in a post on X.
SpaceXAI, the newest subsidiary of the now public company SpaceX, will make Grok 4.5 publicly available tomorrow, and the model is promised to be an “Opus-class model.”
What Musk means by “Opus-class” is that Grok 4.5 should be as good as Anthropic’s most powerful generally available AI model, Claude Opus 4.8.
Claude Opus, which is used by major companies like Shopify and Cursor, is typically used for advanced coding tasks and knowledge work, according to Anthropic.
The flagship model is regarded as Anthropic’s “most capable Opus-tier model for complex reasoning and agentic coding,” and is considered the company’s most powerful consumer model.
According to Anthropic, Claude Opus 4.8 beats most other AI models across various categories, including coding ability, reasoning, knowledge work, financial analysis, and more.
Musk claims that Grok 4.5 is as good as Claude Opus, but it is also faster, more effective, cheaper, and more efficient with tokens than its rival.
Anthropic users control how much effort Claude Opus puts into completing tasks.
For certain tasks, like “long-running asynchronous workflows,” users can turn on “extra” mode or even set Claude Opus to “max.”
However, this means that the AI model will use more tokens to get better results.
While Musk promises superior performance from Grok 4.5, it’s unclear whether SpaceXAI has implemented methods to deliver on those promises while preserving users’ tokens.
OpenAI is also launching what is described as its most capable model tomorrow, called GPT-5.6.
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