Musk Says SpaceX Will Sometimes Use Rival Models to Power Grok Bot

Elon Musk announced on Tuesday night that SpaceX’s AI unit will now use some AI models from competitors to power Grok Bot, signaling a shift away from relying exclusively on models developed in-house.

“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,” Musk wrote on X.

The approach means the Grok Bot interface could act as a front-end that routes user requests to different AI systems depending on which model is best suited to a particular task. For example, SpaceX could use Claude for reasoning tasks and Midjourney for image generation. Grok Bot is designed as an always on AI agent that can perform tasks autonomously across websites, email, and other applications.

The move could have larger implications for SpaceX’s AI division, which has been trying to catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI and has lost many of its AI research staff over the last year. The company acquired the coding startup Cursor earlier this year to help bolster its coding efforts. SpaceX has increasingly begun selling its compute to rival AI labs, including Anthropic and Google since the spring.