Tesla asks employees to use xAI's Grok first

Elon Musk told Tesla staff in a memo to use xAI's Grok when possible, because Grok 4.5 costs less per token than rivals. Tesla had set a $200 weekly AI spending limit per employee, covering Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google products, but not Grok.

Tesla has been testing Grok internally for months, with xAI's product lead working closely with Tesla engineers. Still, several insiders say most Tesla engineers prefer using Anthropic's Claude in daily work.

xAI launched Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, calling it an "Opus-level" model. But it ranks ninth in a multi-domain benchmark with 76.3 points, and scores just 68.6 in coding, the lowest among all models. Musk admitted the gap, but said most tasks don't need top-tier models.