Grok 4.5 to launch soon, Elon Musk says it could rival Anthropic Claude Opus

Elon Musk has shared fresh details about the next stage of xAI's artificial intelligence roadmap, revealing that Grok 4.5 has entered private beta testing at SpaceX and Tesla while suggesting the company is rapidly closing the gap with the industry's leading AI models.

In a series of posts on X, Musk said the latest version of Grok is built on the company's new 1.5-trillion-parameter V9 foundation model and incorporates supplementary training using data from AI coding platform Cursor. According to him, initial internal evaluations indicate the model performs at a level comparable to Anthropic's Claude Opus, with the possibility that it could outperform it in some areas.

The update comes as competition among AI developers continues to intensify, with companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI racing to release increasingly capable large language models while investing heavily in computing infrastructure.

Grok roadmap accelerates

Musk said reinforcement learning continues to improve Grok's capabilities, while the company's development tools are becoming more efficient. He added that SpaceX plans to release completely new AI models trained from scratch every month for the rest of the year, signalling a significantly faster development cycle than in previous generations.

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Despite his optimistic assessment, Musk also sought to temper expectations. Responding to another X user, he clarified that he was not claiming the V9 foundation model would dramatically outperform every competing system. Instead, he described it as "a solid workhorse in the same league as Opus," indicating that xAI's immediate goal is competitive parity rather than a clear lead.

Musk also contrasted the new architecture with the model underpinning Grok 4.3. He said the earlier V8 foundation model, which completed training in December and contains around 500 billion parameters, has several fundamental shortcomings. As a result, he expects Grok 4.5 to represent a substantial improvement over its predecessor.

The billionaire also credited engineers from SpaceX's Starlink and Starship programmes for helping accelerate AI development, saying a number of senior aerospace engineers have shifted much of their focus to the company's AI efforts.

Focus shifts to infrastructure

Beyond model performance, Musk suggested xAI is working to overhaul the technology stack that powers Grok, arguing that software optimisation will be as important as model scaling in future releases.

He said the company expects "truly massive gains" within roughly three months as it rewrites its training and inference systems in C and C++, removing multiple software layers to simplify the overall architecture. Musk added that the work also includes tightly optimising Grok to run on Nvidia's GB300 AI platform, a move aimed at improving both training efficiency and inference performance.

The comments offer a glimpse into xAI's broader strategy as it seeks to compete with more established AI developers. Rather than focusing solely on building larger models, the company appears to be combining increased model scale with infrastructure improvements and a faster release cadence.

Grok has become a central part of Musk's AI ambitions since xAI launched the chatbot in 2023, with newer versions increasingly integrated into the X platform and tested across his wider group of companies.

While Musk's performance claims have not been independently verified, the latest announcements suggest xAI is preparing for a much faster pace of development. If the company delivers on its plan to release new models every month, the AI race could become even more competitive in the second half of the year, as developers push to improve reasoning, coding and enterprise capabilities while competing for users and commercial customers.