Elon Musk admits Grok lags behind Anthropic’s AI model, says xAI needs time to catch up

Elon Musk, acknowledged on X that xAI’s Grok is less advanced than Anthropic’s latest offerings, marking a rare moment of public humility from someone who usually operates at maximum confidence. The admission carries real weight. Musk didn’t just say Grok needs improvement. He said he was wrong about Anthropic’s standing in the AI landscape entirely, calling the company the current leader with no rivals matching its top models. The numbers tell the story Grok 4.5, which xAI launched on July 8, 2026, was supposed to be a competitive leap forward. The model is priced aggressively at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, positioning it as a cost-effective alternative to the field’s heavyweights. Benchmark scores paint a clear picture: Grok 4.5 lags behind both Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 across multiple categories. The gap is especially pronounced in coding tasks, where Grok 4.5 scored just 53% on the DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark. Musk pointed to a straightforward explanation for the disparity. xAI has been operating for roughly three years, while Anthropic has had six years to build its team, refine its research pipeline, and iterate on model architecture...