Musk Says Grok Trails Anthropic After $60 Billion Cursor Deal

Cursor built its reputation around an AI coding assistant designed to help developers generate, understand and revise software. SpaceX’s acquisition of the startup signals a deeper push into artificial intelligence and automated software development, with Cursor’s technology potentially supporting a broader range of agent-based tools. The deal also raises questions over how the product will fit alongside other AI initiatives associated with the SpaceX ecosystem.

SpaceX has officially closed its acquisition of Cursor, according to the latest reports, though the companies have not disclosed the exact closing date or financial terms. The Cursor name may be phased out over the coming months, while a general-purpose AI agent under development could be renamed Grok Bot. SpaceX has yet to announce a detailed integration timetable or confirm the final branding of the product.

Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic with Grok, but the lab entered 2026 amid a wave of co-founder and senior-engineer departures. Musk said the company had not been “built right the first time,” highlighting gaps in coding models and execution. SpaceX absorbed xAI in an all-stock deal in February that valued the AI business at $250 billion, while former Cursor product-engineering leaders Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg joined the rebuilding effort.

SpaceXAI and Cursor announced their partnership on April 21, giving SpaceX the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for the collaboration. On July 8, they released Grok 4.5, jointly trained with Colossus compute and trillions of tokens from real developer-agent interactions. The model costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens and is available in Cursor, Grok Build and through the SpaceXAI API, strengthening Musk’s position against Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

As competition in generative AI intensifies worldwide, Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is expanding into AI coding agents and office-software integration through its acquisition of the popular development tool Cursor. The move is aimed at challenging the dominance of rivals such as OpenAI and improving the model’s practical capabilities with real-world developer interaction data, attracting close attention from the technology industry and investors.

SpaceXAI said it would formally release Grok 4.5, its most powerful model, on July 9. Built on a 1.5-trillion-parameter base model, it is the company’s first model trained with Cursor’s IDE interaction data. Positioned as a faster, lower-cost offering, Grok 4.5 will go head-to-head with OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, launching the same day, as the companies compete for enterprise customers.