Elon Musk orders Tesla shift to xAI’s Grok; engineers asked to email feedback

Elon Musk told Tesla staff to start using Grok, the AI model from SpaceXAI. According to a report by The Information, Musk sent a memo to employees on July 10 telling them to switch to Grok "when possible," citing Grok 4.5's lower token costs compared to rival models. In the memo, he also asked engineers to email him directly sharing feedback on the model if they see any issue. The move comes just days after Tesla capped employee spending on other AI tools.The memo follows a new company rule introduced earlier this month that limits employees to $200 a week in AI spending. That cap covers models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. It does not apply to xAI's Grok.Tesla has tested beta versions of Grok internally for months. SpaceXAI product lead Andrew Milich has worked with Tesla staff to fix issues during that testing. Despite this, four people familiar with internal usage said Tesla engineers mostly prefer Anthropic's Claude for daily development work.SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 AI modelSpaceXAI launched Grok 4.5 earlier this month. Dubbed as the company’s “most intelligent model,” the company said that Grok 4.5 was trained across tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, with training and stability techniques designed for large-scale runs. “Beyond raw token volume, we invested heavily in data filtering and curation: deduplication, quality scoring, and domain-focused selection so that the data mixture stayed high-coverage and high-signal”."It ​is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost," SpaceX CEO Elon ‌Musk ⁠said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “Grok 4.5 is built for real-world engineering. It excels in large codebases and handles long-running tasks that span multiple repositories, hundreds of skills, and a variety of tools,” reads an X post by SpaceXAI.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.