November 5, 2026 | AI News | MonkeyButtAI
Despite the rumors, Elon Musk hasn’t killed Grok. But his decision to put a rival’s AI inside Grok Bot, followed by an admission about unsustainable costs, raises some interesting questions about the future of his AI business.
It IS a bit embarrassing. Imagine spending billions building an AI competitor to ChatGPT and Claude, launching your own AI agent, and then announcing that you need your competitors’ technology to continue.
Welcome to the latest chapter of Elon Musk’s AI adventure.
Wait. Grok Is Using Claude?
On October 7, Musk announced that Grok Bot, his company’s autonomous AI agent, would use the best available AI system for each task, even when that system belonged to a competitor. (So, basically, it will ALWAYS be using a competitor! What? I kid.)
He named three specific services:
- Claude Opus 5.5: Anthropic’s AI for reasoning, coding and complex tasks.
- Midjourney: AI image generation.
- Suno: AI music generation.
Musk claimed that his priority was choosing whichever system would produce the best result for users.
but then came an even more revealing statement.
Lauren (@poteto), a member of the Grok Bot team, posted this:
“all bots will be powered by opus 5.5”
She also explained that the bots could launch additional cloud agents using Cursor’s available models.
That’s a significant distinction. Claude wasn’t simply being mentioned as an occasional option. According to someone working on the product, it was intended to power the bots themselves.
The company has since documented a flexible system that can choose different models for different requests. That means that the Grok Bot name no longer necessarily tells you which AI is doing the thinking.
And Now Musk Says Grok Bot Costs Too Much
On November 1, Grok Bot subscribers began complaining that their usage allowances were disappearing far faster than expected.
One user reported reaching 100% of their allowance with four days remaining before the reset.
Musk responded with an impressive – though concerning – candid explanation: the cost of operating Grok Bot was “unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
Other users reported similar problems, and Musk defended the reduced allowances as a sensible business decision.
It’s important to understand that these weren’t complaints about a minor visual redesign or a missing feature. Customers were questioning how much AI work their subscriptions actually bought. And it was much less than they signed up for.
The situation highlights an uncomfortable reality of the AI-agent business: subscriptions provide predictable income, but autonomous agents can generate enormous and unpredictable computing costs. Unlike a conventional chatbot, which mostly waits for questions, Grok Bot can operate computers, interact with websites and keep working through extended tasks.
Every additional action potentially consumes more computing resources. And that, dear user, is coming out of your credits.
There’s one important caveat: Musk has not established that introducing Claude caused Grok Bot’s cost problems. His Claude announcement came nearly four weeks before the public cost admission, and the connection between those events remains unproven.
So Is Grok Actually Dead?
Well, no.
SpaceX’s AI business still maintains its own Grok models.
Grok 4.7 was released on September 21, with improvements aimed at coding, reasoning and longer-running AI tasks. It remains listed in the company’s official API documentation.
The regular Grok chatbot and Grok Bot are also different products. Grok Bot is an autonomous agent that can delegate tasks to external models. The Grok chatbot remains a separate service.
Musk hasn’t announced the end of Grok’s model development. But what has changed is that his agent platform no longer has to depend exclusively on the AI developed by his own company.
The Bigger Question: What Exactly Are Customers Paying For?
If the product you purchase is called Grok Bot, but its reasoning might be performed by Claude, what are you actually buying?
The company will claim you are buying the orchestration: the interface, tools, persistent computer, integrations and ability to complete real tasks. And it is a legitimate business strategy. Plenty of AI companies build useful products on top of other companies’ models.
But it creates a serious transparency issue. According to Grok Bot’s own FAQ, customers cannot select the underlying model, cannot demand that a particular model be excluded, and cannot see which provider handled an individual request.
It means concerns about privacy, costs, performance and dependence on third-party AI providers is out of your own control. So, if “Grok” picks a more expensive model, YOU pay for it. If a company that’s chosen has lax privacy constraints, you information gets leaked or shared.
It also raises another question: if customers increasingly value the agent experience rather than the model underneath, how much competitive advantage comes from owning the AI model itself?
The MonkeyButtAI Take
The internet-friendly version of this story is that Musk killed Grok and replaced it with Claude.
The more interesting reality is that Musk is willing to use competing AI systems inside a product carrying his own brand, while publicly acknowledging that providing that product has become financially difficult.
Neither development means Grok is finished. But together, they reveal the challenge facing companies building autonomous AI agents: creating impressive AI isn’t enough. They also have to deliver results at a price customers will pay and providers can sustain.
And when even Elon Musk is willing to borrow a rival’s AI brain, the competition may be shifting away from who builds the smartest model and toward who builds the most useful product around it.
The Grok name survives. What’s underneath that name is becoming a much more complicated question.
FAQ
Is Grok being discontinued?
No. Grok remains a separate AI model family. The changes concern Grok Bot, an autonomous agent product that can use both proprietary and third-party AI models.
Why is Grok Bot using Claude?
Elon Musk has said Grok Bot will select the most suitable AI model for each task. This allows the product to use competing technologies, including Claude Opus 5.5, rather than depending exclusively on proprietary Grok models.
Is Grok Bot losing money?
Musk stated that Grok Bot’s operating costs were unsustainably high compared with revenue. That raises questions about its subscription economics, but does not establish the product’s overall profitability or prove that Claude caused the cost problems.
Sources
- Elon Musk’s October 7 announcement on X
- Grok Bot team member Lauren’s October 7 statement
- Official Grok Bot FAQ — model selection and routing
- Official Grok 4.7 announcement
- TechCrunch — November 2 cost and usage-limit report
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