SpaceX’s Grok 4.5 launches at half the price of rivals — here’s why that could rattle Anthropic and OpenAI

Elon Musk's SpaceX released Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, the first artificial intelligence model the company has trained specifically for coding and autonomous agents — and the first tangible product of its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor,… Elon Musk's SpaceX released Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, the first artificial intelligence model the company has trained specifically for coding and autonomous agents — and the first tangible product of its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor, completed just weeks ago.The launch marks a pivotal test of the sprawling, vertically integrated AI empire Musk has assembled over the past six months, and of a strategy that bets developers care less about topping benchmark leaderboards than about speed, cost, and whether a model can actually do the work."Announcing Grok 4.5, our first model trained specifically for coding and agents," the company said in a post on X. "It was trained with Cursor and offers frontier intelligence at leading speeds and cost efficiency."Why Grok 4.5's pricing strategy matters more than its benchmark scoresSpaceX is not claiming Grok 4.5 is the smartest model in the world. Instead, it is making an economic argument. The company says the model uses half…