The federal government managed to temporarily ban Anthropic’s latest AI model from being used by foreign nationals and reportedly held up the release of OpenAI’s updated GPT-5.6 Sol for security concerns, but it seems the latest version of Grok must have just skated right through. Grok 4.5, the first release of an AI model under the newly formed SpaceXAI, was made available to the public on Wednesday.
Elon Musk’s rocket/social media/AI company claims Grok 4.5 is its “smartest model built to excel at coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work.” Notably, it’s also the first release the company has made since partnering with AI coding company Cursor. In particular, SpaceXAI said its latest model “excels at real engineering tasks” and is “equally adept at office work,” and claimed it compares favorably to other leading models in those areas.
Despite that, Grok still seems behind on most major benchmarks. It trails both Claude’s Fable 5—the “safe” version of its super-powerful Mythos model—and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which is now no longer that company’s flagship option, anyway. In most of the testing metrics, Grok 4.5 scores on par with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, which is a couple of months old at this point.
The calling card for Grok, though, appears to be efficiency and cost. “It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient, and lower cost,” Musk wrote in a post on X. To that end, the company claims that Grok 4.5 costs about $2 per one million input tokens and $6 per one million output tokens. By comparison, according to The Decoder, Opus 4.8 runs at $5 for inputs and $25 for outputs. Fable, Anthropic’s big hitter, costs $10 for input and $50 for output on that same one-million-token scale.
“Cheap” probably isn’t a word anyone would typically associate with SpaceX, but, in general, Grok is kind of a square peg in a round hole. SpaceX has managed to keep itself clean of the Elon Musk stink even as he drives his own personal brand into the ground, but associating with Grok is going to be a real test of the brand’s strength. It’s tough to get roped into being linked to an AI model that is at this point best known for producing non-consensual nude images, including those of children, at a scale never before achieved—a pretty dubious honor if ever there was one.
Since Grok seemingly didn’t get caught up by government review, Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, all Cursor plans, and from the SpaceXAI console starting today.
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