Elon Musk says Grok Bot will use Anthropic’s Claude when it beats Grok

Elon Musk says his company’s AI agent will stop relying only on Grok. In a post on X on Wednesday morning, Musk said SpaceX will run Grok Bot on “the best back end model for any given task”, naming Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 first, followed by Midjourney and Suno.

Important note regarding Grok @Bot:

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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 7, 2026

The post was viewed more than 5 million times in its first two hours. It is the clearest sign yet that SpaceX is willing to put a rival’s model behind its own product when that model does the job better.

What Grok Bot is

Grok Bot is the AI agent SpaceXAI put into beta in August. Instead of chatting, it works on its own cloud computer, using a browser and the apps you connect to it, and keeps going after you walk away. People get it through a SuperGrok subscription or a paid Cursor plan, and Tesla has added it to its cars as well.

Until now it has been sold as a showcase for Grok. Under Musk’s plan, a Bot asked to write code or a report could pass the job to Claude, one asked for an image could use Midjourney, and one asked for music could use Suno, all behind the same Grok Bot window. Musk said “other leading APIs” would be included too, but didn’t name them.

Musk has already admitted Claude is ahead

The move follows Musk’s own verdict on the models. Less than two weeks ago he admitted that Grok 4.7 is “not as good as” Opus 5.5, and said SpaceXAI would probably catch up “sometime next year”. Grok 4.7 had launched without beating Claude on the benchmarks that matter most for coding and agents.

The two companies are already tied together in other ways. Cursor, which SpaceX owns, offers Claude Opus 5.5 to its paying users, and Anthropic’s IPO filing shows computing deals with SpaceX worth up to $84.5 billion through 2029. Using Claude inside Grok Bot would make Anthropic a supplier to SpaceX’s AI business as well as a customer of its computing power.

Anthropic hasn’t commented on the post, and neither company has said whether a new commercial agreement is behind it.

What Musk didn’t say

The post is short, and it leaves the practical questions open. Musk didn’t say how Grok Bot will decide which model is “best” for a job, whether users will be able to see or choose the model doing their work, or whether prices will change. Several replies under the post asked exactly that, including whether people could end up with a cheaper model than the one they expected.

The bigger question is data. A Grok Bot works inside the accounts and files its owner connects, and SpaceXAI’s terms already make users responsible for everything its agents do. Sending tasks to Anthropic, Midjourney or Suno would mean some of that material leaving SpaceX for another company’s servers, and Musk didn’t say how that will be handled or whether customers can switch it off.

There is also no date. Musk said “going forward” rather than giving a launch, and SpaceXAI hasn’t published anything about the change on its own site.

Why it matters

Musk has spent years arguing that Grok will beat every rival, so routing his flagship agent through Claude is a striking admission that, for now, the best product wins over the house model. It also points to where AI agents are heading: the agent and its access to your apps become the product, and the model behind it becomes a part that can be swapped.

Sources: Elon Musk on X, October 7, 2026.