Elon Musk has confirmed that the advanced AI model Grok 4.5 will become publicly available on Thursday, July 9, 2026. In a social media announcement on Tuesday evening, Musk described the model as “Opus-class,” directly comparing it to Anthropic’s Claude series while claiming it is “faster, more token-efficient and lower cost.”
The new model is built on xAI’s (now rebranded as SpaceXAI) V9 foundation model, which boasts an impressive 1.5 trillion parameters—roughly three times the size of the current public Grok model. Musk had previously indicated the model entered private beta testing at SpaceX and Tesla in late June, where it received “strong positive feedback.”
The release marks the first model jointly developed with Cursor, the coding startup SpaceX is acquiring for $60 billion. Grok 4.5 arrives amid intensifying AI competition; OpenAI is set to launch GPT-5.6 the same day after a delay over national security concerns. Independent analysis suggests the leading AI labs are clustered closely in performance, shifting competition toward efficiency and price—exactly the factors Musk emphasized.
On the markets side, SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) stock fell nearly 7% in its first session as a Nasdaq 100 member on Tuesday, pressured by a broader tech selloff. It inched up 0.12% in pre-market Wednesday. Analyst consensus remains a Strong Buy with an average price target of $212.08, implying a potential upside of around 46%.
