SpaceXAI Launches Grok 4.5, a Cheaper Answer to Claude Opus

SpaceXAI, the company formed by the merger of SpaceX and xAI, unveiled Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, a model Elon Musk describes as Opus-class but faster and markedly cheaper. The launch is the conglomerate's first major move since its record-breaking stock market debut and its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor's creator.

A New Brand After the Merger

xAI, the company Musk founded in 2023, ceased to exist as a separate entity in February 2026, when SpaceX merged with it in an all-stock deal worth $1.25 trillion. Musk described the plan at the time as building the most integrated innovation engine on Earth and beyond, combining artificial intelligence, rockets, satellite internet, and the X platform.

In June, SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq in a $75 billion offering, the largest IPO in history, selling 555,555,555 shares at $135 each. The stock rose nearly 20 percent on its first day of trading. It wasn't until July 6 that the @SpaceXAI account replaced the xAI brand on X, and Grok 4.5 is the first product to carry the new name.

Cursor Acquisition Reshapes Strategy

Four days after its stock market debut, SpaceX announced it was acquiring Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in stock, the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup in history. Cursor, founded in 2022, grew explosively and hit $2 billion in annual recurring revenue in February 2026, making it the fastest-growing software company ever recorded.

The acquisition puts SpaceXAI directly into the developer tools market, alongside Microsoft with GitHub Copilot and Gemini Code, and Anthropic with Claude Code. Cursor has 50,000 enterprise customers, giving SpaceXAI instant access to a developer base that Grok 4.5 will now serve directly within the app.

Price as a Weapon

Grok 4.5's pricing strategy is clear: undercut the premium Anthropic and OpenAI charge for their most capable models. For workloads heavy on output tokens, typical of agents running multi-step coding tasks, a 76 to 80 percent price gap makes a substantial difference in the bill for any company running a model at scale.

It's an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient, and cheaper - Elon Musk, SpaceXAI

Musk added that SpaceXAI's internal testing shows performance roughly on par with Opus 4.7, with noticeably higher speed. The company also touts double the token efficiency of its rivals, which in practice means shorter reasoning chains needed to complete the same task.

What It Means for Developers in Poland

For development teams using coding agents, the price pressure from Grok 4.5 could force another round of price cuts from competitors, much as happened with previous generations of GPT and Claude. Companies budgeting for AI developer tools now have an additional option, especially since the model is already available across all Cursor plans, in Grok Build, and in the SpaceXAI console.

The model is not yet available in the European Union, meaning Polish users will have to wait for a formal rollout compliant with local regulations. Given the pace at which SpaceXAI has been shipping products since the SpaceX merger, that delay is unlikely to last long.

The launch coincides with OpenAI's announcement of its GPT-5.6 models, meaning that within the same week three leading labs, SpaceXAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all updated their frontier model lineups. For enterprise customers, it's a sign that choosing a language model provider will now happen on much shorter cycles than just a year ago.

Sources: SpacexAI Releases Grok 4.5 (techcrunch.com), Introducing Grok 4.5 (x.ai), SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock (techcrunch.com), Elon Musk confirms SpaceX merger with xAI ahead of IPO (finance.yahoo.com), SpaceX blasts off with a record-breaking $75 billion IPO (npr.org)