In an interview with China Media Group at Tesla's engineering headquarters, Elon Musk conceded that xAI's Grok 4.7 does not match Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. He called Grok a 'solid workhorse,' acknowledged Anthropic's technological lead, and estimated SpaceXAI could close the gap and catch up to frontier models next year.

Musk paired the admission with a growth claim: Grok Bot, xAI's agent product, is growing 100% month over month. He said the performance gap reflects xAI's shorter operational history versus Anthropic's longer tenure in the field.

His closing argument was differentiation, not benchmarks. Musk said xAI's integration of physical engineering data from Tesla and SpaceX could give Grok an edge in real-world engineering work — a niche where, he argues, no AI model currently excels.