Musk says Grok chatbot will tap rival Anthropic’s Claude

Elon Musk said on Wednesday, Oct. 7, that the Grok bot will send tasks to whichever AI model is best suited to them, including Anthropic's Claude Opus, the image generator Midjourney and the AI music platform Suno. Musk owns a competing chatbot business, so the decision means outside companies' technology will now do some of the work inside his own product.cityam

In a post on X, Musk said Grok would use the "best back-end model for any given task." He described the aim as "whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome," City AM reported. Coverage of the post says the Anthropic model named is Claude Opus 5.5, along with "other leading APIs".dealroom+2

A change of course for xAI

Musk launched xAI in 2023 to compete directly with OpenAI, which he co-founded and later left. He has since spent billions of dollars on the computing power needed to train Grok models. The AI business has now been folded into SpaceX. In August, the combined operation launched Grok Bot, a system of individual agents that each have their own computer and can work on several tasks at once.cityam

Wednesday's announcement means those agents will not always run on Musk's in-house models. Instead, Grok can hand a request to an outside system. City AM said the move may point to a wider change in how AI companies compete: as different models get better at different jobs, controlling the interface that picks between them may matter as much commercially as building the models themselves.cityam

Benchmarks published in September help explain the choice. Independent tests put Claude Opus 5 ahead of xAI's Grok 4.7 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, scoring 51 to 46. Grok 4.7 costs much less per token.evolink

A commercial win for Anthropic

The arrangement brings Anthropic more business as it takes a growing share of corporate AI spending. City AM data published last month found that Anthropic accounted for as much as half of UK small businesses' spending with major AI providers in September. ChatGPT's share fell from 60% to 36% over the same period. The figures come from transactions on Capital on Tap, covering more than 300,000 British small businesses.cityam

Anthropic is preparing for a possible stock market listing that its investors expect could value the company at $2 trillion or more. OpenAI has delayed its own possible listing while it works through safety concerns.cityam

The announcement came a day after an outage on Tuesday, Oct. 6, when users reported problems reaching Grok on mobile and web. More than half of the complaints logged during the disruption involved AI generation. No official cause has been given.cityam