Musk’s Grok Bot Turns to Claude for Help

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When your own model isn’t enough, you buy in: Elon Musk has just announced that the A.I. agent Grok Bot will no longer rely solely on the in-house Grok models. SpaceX will use “the best back end model for any given task,” Mr. Musk wrote on X. As examples, he named, of all things, Claude Opus 5.5 from rival Anthropic, the image generator Midjourney and the music generator Suno, along with other leading A.I. APIs. The Information first reported the news.

What Grok Bot Is

Grok Bot is an agent app from SpaceXAI, the A.I. unit Mr. Musk folded into SpaceX along with xAI. The app launched in August. Each Bot works on its own computer in the cloud and can handle several tasks in parallel. Since late September, teams have been able to publish a shared Bot that colleagues can use in the app or in Slack. Mr. Musk did not say which tasks will go to which model. According to The Next Web, the announcement came a day after users complained about problems reaching Grok in the app and on the web. SpaceXAI gave no official cause.

An Admission

For Mr. Musk, the move is remarkable. He founded xAI in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and has poured billions into data centers to train the Grok models. It just emerged that SpaceX wants to take on $40 billion (about €35.6 billion) in debt to buy Nvidia chips. Having Grok Bot hand off tasks to Claude is an admission that its own models don’t lead everywhere. On the Artificial Analysis ranking, for example, Claude Opus 5.5 sits ahead of Google’s Gemini 4 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra.

Things are restless at Mr. Musk’s A.I. unit anyway: xAI became SpaceXAI only in July, and now the company is set to be renamed SpaceXSI, a nod to President Trump, who wants A.I. to be called “superintelligence” from now on.

Model Routing Becomes the Norm

By mixing several models, Mr. Musk is following a trend. Microsoft uses Anthropic models alongside OpenAI’s in Microsoft 365 Copilot and plans to switch between local and cloud models depending on the task in Windows. The answer engine Perplexity has long let its customers choose among models from different providers. In the market for personal A.I. agents, Grok Bot competes with Meta’s Muse, among others, which reportedly has more than 3 million weekly users.