SpaceX's artificial intelligence unit will use competitor AI models to power its Grok Bot assistant, Elon Musk announced on Tuesday, abandoning an approach that relied exclusively on technology developed in house.
"Going forward, SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs," Musk wrote on X.
The move turns Grok Bot into a routing layer, directing user requests to whichever external model is best suited for a given task rather than relying solely on SpaceX's own systems.
Grok Bot is designed as an always-on AI agent capable of performing tasks autonomously across websites, email and other applications.
The decision reflects the difficulties SpaceX has faced in keeping pace with Anthropic and OpenAI in AI model development, having lost a significant number of its AI research staff over the past year.
The company acquired Cursor, a coding startup, earlier this year to shore up its software capabilities, and has also begun selling spare computing capacity to rival AI labs, including Anthropic and Google, since the spring.
