Post-Cutoff.com
  1. Home
  2. Timeline
  3. 2026
  4. Musk: SpaceX's Grok Bot will use 'the best back end model…

Musk: SpaceX's Grok Bot will use 'the best back end model for any given task', including Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno

★★★after cutoffagentsSpaceXAISpaceXAnthropicMidjourneySunoconfidence: high

On Oct 7, 2026 Elon Musk said SpaceX's Grok Bot agent will "use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs". That puts rival companies' models behind SpaceXAI's flagship agent product. A member of the Grok Bot team said on X that the Bots themselves will run on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, rolling out that day, and that the model is chosen automatically. By midday UTC no one had said how Claude is accessed, what it costs, whether users can opt out or how their data is handled, and no statements from SpaceXAI, Anthropic, Midjourney or Suno were found.

Key facts

What happened

At 06:46 UTC on Oct 7, 2026 Elon Musk posted an "important note regarding Grok @Bot", tagging the agent's official X account and SpaceX: "Going forward, @SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs. Whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome." The post passed 21 million views within five hours.

Musk added nothing further in the thread. The most specific details came from @poteto, who works on Grok Bot at SpaceXAI according to her X bio. She quote-posted Musk with "Grok Bot is getting an upgrade!" (~116K views) and answered users' questions:

  • the Bot "itself will run on a different model, opus 5.5 is rolling out right now";
  • "all bots will be powered by opus 5.5, and they can spawn cloud agents of whatever cursor models we have" (~106K views);
  • users cannot pick the model: it is "automatic!";
  • when a user said the Bots would switch back to Grok if Grok became the best model, she replied "yup".

These are an employee's replies, not official documentation, so the details of the rollout have medium confidence. Shortly before her answers, one user reported that their Bot said Suno was not available.

The post leaves the practical questions open. It does not say how Claude is reached (directly through Anthropic's API or through another platform), what users will pay, whether they can see or restrict which provider handles a task, or how data from connected apps is protected when it goes to a third party. RuntimeWire listed these gaps. The top replies to Musk raised the same points: an opt-out because "I don't want the data I share with my Grok Bots going to Anthropic" (27K views), "GPT models too, right?" (37K) and whether it costs extra (~13K). No reply from Musk or SpaceXAI appeared among the top replies checked at ~11:40 UTC.

Reactions: Robert Scoble wrote "Grok goes open. Holy shit." (~79K views). Toby Pohlen, formerly on xAI's founding team, wrote that Grok used Flux for image generation in its early days, which "was decisive in growing the product before the model was ready", and that the policy "sets the bar for the model teams: your model has to beat the competition or it won't make it into the product."

By ~11:40 UTC coverage came only from smaller outlets and aggregators (RuntimeWire, dev.ua, TVC News, KuCoin/BlockBeats, Hugging News, Digg). No tier-1 outlet (Bloomberg, Reuters, The Verge, TechCrunch, Business Insider, The Information) had reported it yet. This entry was written about five hours after the post, so later runs should check for official SpaceXAI documentation, any Anthropic comment and tier-1 follow-ups.

Context

  • Grok Bot launched on Aug 11, 2026 as an always-on agent with its own cloud computer, sold through SuperGrok and Cursor plans. At launch VentureBeat noted that its model routing was automatic and undisclosed (see the Grok Bot entry). Tech Dev Notes found "Claude Opus 5 available as a model option" in a dogfood-only Grok Bot desktop build on Sept 2, 2026.
  • SpaceXAI is the former xAI, merged into SpaceX in February 2026. SpaceX also owns Cursor (the deal closed on Aug 14, 2026). OpenAI is ending Cursor's access to its models, with a proposed shutoff on Nov 12, 2026, and said no future OpenAI models would go to Cursor.
  • SpaceXAI rents compute to Anthropic. The Colossus 1 deal was announced in May 2026, and Fortune put the contract at about $1.25B a month.
  • Pricing: no change was announced. On Sept 30 Bloomberg reported a planned $100/month Ultra tier that would include Grok Bot.
  • In July 2026 Musk told Tesla staff to switch to Grok "when possible" because of Grok 4.5's lower token costs, while writing on X that "Fable is definitely better than Grok 4.5" (Electrek, citing The Information). On Sept 26 he told China Media Group that Grok 4.7 is "not as good as, say, Opus 5.5" and that SpaceXAI expected to catch up to the frontier "sometime next year".

Why it matters

It is a rare case of an AI lab putting a direct competitor's model behind its own flagship agent product, announced publicly by the company's owner. If it ships as the Grok Bot team described, SpaceXAI competes on the agent layer: cloud computers, connectors, memory, and distribution through SuperGrok, Cursor and Tesla cars. Anthropic would in turn become a model supplier to a rival that is also one of its compute providers. For Grok Bot users, the main open question is how data passed to third-party models is handled.

Changelog

  • 2026-10-07: created from Musk's X post, replies by the Grok Bot team and early coverage (sweep 2026-10-07 quick run)

People

Elon Musk

Related posts (8)

Related events

  1. SpaceXAI launches Grok Bot, always-on agent 'teammates' with their own cloud computers ★★★
  2. Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5 — Fable-5.1-level performance at $4/$20, first model of the Claude 5.5 family ★★★★★
  3. SpaceX exercises its option to buy Cursor maker Anysphere for $60B in stock; deal closes Aug 14 ★★★★
  4. OpenAI ends its model contract with Cursor after SpaceX's acquisition, citing Musk's record of breaking contracts ★★★
  5. SpaceXAI turns into an AI cloud provider: talks with Microsoft on leasing capacity, on top of Anthropic and Google contracts ★★★
  6. SpaceXAI plans a unified Grok + X subscription, from free and $8 Lite up to $100/month Ultra with Grok Bot (report) ★★
  7. SpaceX absorbs xAI in a $1.25 trillion merger (later rebranded SpaceXAI) ★★★★
  8. SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.7 with a new larger base model and new safeguard stack ★★★★
  9. Code with Claude 2026: Managed Agents "dreaming", doubled Claude Code limits and SpaceX Colossus 1 compute deal ★★★

Sources (24)

id: 2026-10-07-grok-bot-routes-to-claude-opus-5-5-rival-models · updated 2026-10-07 · open in the interactive timeline