Elon Musk's SpaceXAI Launches Grok 4.5 Ahead of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Debut

Just a day before OpenAI is set to publicly release GPT-5.6, Elon Musk's SpaceXAI has unveiled Grok 4.5, describing it as the company's most capable AI model yet. Designed primarily for coding and agentic AI tasks, the new model is immediately available to developers through SpaceXAI's platform and coding tools.

The launch further intensifies competition among AI companies as OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI race to release increasingly powerful frontier models.

Built for Coding and AI Agents

According to SpaceXAI, Grok 4.5 has been trained on tens of thousands of Nvidia GB300 GPUs, with an emphasis on cleaner datasets through extensive filtering, deduplication and quality scoring.

The company says the model has been optimised for software development and autonomous AI agents that can perform multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention.

Grok 4.5 is available through Grok Build, SpaceXAI's AI coding assistant, as well as the company's developer console via API access. The model is expected to roll out in the European Union later this month.

Cursor Partnership Gets a Boost

The launch also strengthens SpaceXAI's partnership with Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI coding platforms.

Cursor confirmed it worked with SpaceXAI during the training of Grok 4.5. The collaboration comes shortly after SpaceX announced plans to acquire Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, in an all-stock deal reportedly valued at $60 billion, significantly expanding its presence in enterprise AI software.

How Much Does Grok 4.5 Cost?

SpaceXAI has priced Grok 4.5 at:

1. $2 per million input tokens
2. $6 per million output tokens

Elon Musk described the model as "Opus-class, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost."

For comparison, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, while OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna is priced at $1 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.

Comes Ahead of GPT-5.6

The announcement arrives less than 24 hours before OpenAI is expected to publicly launch GPT-5.6, its newest flagship model. OpenAI had postponed the release last month after the US government requested additional testing over national security concerns surrounding advanced AI systems. With both launches happening almost back-to-back, the AI industry is witnessing one of its most competitive release weeks yet.

A Growing AI Arms Race

Grok 4.5 is also the first major flagship model launched since Musk merged xAI into SpaceXAI, consolidating his AI ambitions under a single company. The release underlines how competition in AI has moved beyond chatbot capabilities. Companies are now battling over coding performance, autonomous AI agents, pricing and developer adoption, with each new model aiming to become the default choice for enterprise AI workloads.

For developers, that means more capable models arriving at a faster pace. For the companies behind them, it means the race to dominate the AI ecosystem is only getting more intense.