Elon Musk admits Grok lags behind Anthropic’s AI model, says xAI needs time to catch up

Elon Musk, acknowledged on X that xAI’s Grok is less advanced than Anthropic’s latest offerings, marking a rare moment of public humility from someone who usually operates at maximum confidence.

The admission carries real weight. Musk didn’t just say Grok needs improvement. He said he was wrong about Anthropic’s standing in the AI landscape entirely, calling the company the current leader with no rivals matching its top models.

The numbers tell the story

Grok 4.5, which xAI launched on July 8, 2026, was supposed to be a competitive leap forward. The model is priced aggressively at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, positioning it as a cost-effective alternative to the field’s heavyweights.

Benchmark scores paint a clear picture: Grok 4.5 lags behind both Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 across multiple categories. The gap is especially pronounced in coding tasks, where Grok 4.5 scored just 53% on the DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark.

Musk pointed to a straightforward explanation for the disparity. xAI has been operating for roughly three years, while Anthropic has had six years to build its team, refine its research pipeline, and iterate on model architectures.

A partnership with the rival

Musk isn’t just competing with Anthropic. He’s also partnering with them. SpaceX has secured a major compute agreement with Anthropic involving hundreds of megawatts of power from Colossus facilities, xAI’s massive data center infrastructure.

Musk has pledged to maintain a level playing field for AI infrastructure access, signaling that he won’t use his hardware advantage to kneecap competitors.

Grok’s path forward

Musk’s strategy for closing the gap involves deep integration across his corporate empire. He’s pushing Grok adoption internally at both Tesla and SpaceX, using the models across operational workflows, while teams at both companies retain the flexibility to choose more effective models when necessary.

Musk has expressed optimism that xAI will reach frontier-level performance by 2027. The challenge is that Anthropic isn’t standing still. The company’s Opus 5.5, which Musk specifically called out as superior to Grok, represents a moving target.