SpaceXAI Completes xAI Rebrand, Launches Grok 4.5 at Half Opus's Price

Elon Musk has closed another chapter in the consolidation of his AI empire. The company that until recently operated as xAI has officially completed its rebrand to SpaceXAI, and on the same day unveiled a new model, Grok 4.5, priced well below competing models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

This is the first major model unveiled by the company since it became part of the now publicly traded SpaceX. The consolidation covers the Grok chatbot, the X social platform, and the entire AI infrastructure that previously operated as a separate company, xAI.

The end of the xAI brand

Musk had signaled this move as early as May 2026, saying plainly that xAI would be dissolved as a separate entity and absorbed by SpaceX. The rebrand was finalized shortly after SpaceX completed a record-breaking IPO that valued the company at around $1.77 trillion. A new logo, unveiled in an animated video, shows the letter representing xAI merging into the SpaceX emblem, and the company's account on X has been renamed to SpaceXAI.

SpaceX's acquisition of xAI was finalized in February 2026 in an all-stock deal. In 2025 alone, the AI business consumed $12.7 billion in spending, more than three times what Starlink and the company's other space segments spent, underscoring how large the AI unit had grown inside Musk's company.

A model priced for a price war

Grok 4.5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. By comparison, Anthropic's Opus 4.8 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, more than four times as much on the output side. That price gap strikes directly at the premium segment for coding and analytical work, a segment until now dominated by pricier Anthropic and OpenAI models.

Musk described the new model as a rival to Anthropic's strongest model family, claiming it matches Opus on capability while offering higher speed and lower cost.

This is an Opus-class model, just faster, more token-efficient and cheaper - Elon Musk

According to SpaceXAI's internal benchmarks, Grok 4.5 is roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but noticeably faster. The company stresses that the model is aimed primarily at coding, agentic work, and office tasks like spreadsheets and documents, rather than casual chatbot conversation.

Cursor as a testing ground

Grok 4.5 is the first model unveiled since SpaceXAI acquired Cursor, one of the most popular AI-assisted coding tools. The model was trained partly using data and use cases drawn from Cursor, and is available from launch day across all of that tool's plans, in the SpaceXAI console, and in the Grok Build app.

This is a direct challenge to Anthropic, whose Claude Code has for months been the top choice for many development teams, and to Perplexity, which is building its own coding agent in parallel. Grok 4.5's low price could force another round of price cuts from competitors, especially in the enterprise segment billed for tokens at scale.

What it means for the market

For companies using AI models in daily work, the arrival of a cheaper rival claimed to match quality means real pricing pressure in a segment where per-token rates have until now differed by multiples. The lack of availability in the European Union at launch means Polish companies and developers will not be able to use Grok 4.5 directly for now, unless through an API outside the EU region or through integrations such as Cursor, provided those extend to European users as well.

The rebrand to SpaceXAI also completes the process of merging two of Musk's separate companies into a single corporate structure, in which revenue from AI, satellite internet, and space launches is now meant to flow together under one financial structure and one IPO.

Sources: SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, which Elon describes as an 'Opus-class model' (techcrunch.com), Elon Musk Rebrands xAI as SpaceXAI and Launches Grok 4.5 (techweez.com), xAI makes its rebrand to SpaceXAI complete with a new logo (finance.yahoo.com)