Elon Musk has admitted that Grok still lags behind Anthropic’s latest AI models, though he claims its agentic assistant is doubling users every month.
Speaking to China Media Group, Musk described Grok 4.7 as a “solid workhorse of a model” but conceded that it was not as capable as Anthropic’s recently released Claude Opus 5.5. Musk blamed some of the gap on experience, pointing out that his AI operation has been running for roughly three years while Anthropic has spent about six years developing its technology.
“We probably catch up to frontier sometime next year, most likely,” Musk said. That prediction leaves plenty of room for the inconvenient possibility that Anthropic might continue developing its own models during the intervening period.
Musk said Grok Bot, which acts as a personal digital assistant, was growing by about 100 per cent each month.
SpaceXAI intends to distinguish Grok by training it on engineering information generated by Tesla and SpaceX. Musk said current frontier systems were particularly good at software engineering but saw an opportunity for Grok in physical engineering.
He said only a small amount of SpaceX and Tesla engineering data had been used so far, but believed the companies could provide the material needed to create AI capable of understanding real-world engineering problems. That would give SpaceXAI a somewhat more interesting target than simply producing another chatbot capable of writing Python, composing corporate emails and confidently explaining things it has just invented.
Musk praised Chinese AI models for delivering strong performance despite having less access to advanced computing hardware than US rivals. He claimed China was producing some of the world’s best AI performance per unit of available compute and predicted that domestic lithography and chip manufacturing could remove much of the country’s computing constraint within two or three years.
That timeline differs sharply from assessments by some Western equipment suppliers. Zeiss Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology chief executive Frank Rohmund recently suggested China could remain about 15 years behind the West in the most advanced EUV lithography technology.
For now, Grok 4.7 is available, Anthropic has Opus 5.5 on the market, and Musk has publicly admitted which one he thinks is ahead.
