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Elon Musk says SpaceX is redirecting some of its top engineering talent from the Starlink and Starship programs to strengthen Grok, the company’s artificial intelligence model, as it intensifies efforts to compete with industry leaders in the rapidly evolving AI race.
In a post on X, Musk revealed that “a few dozen” of SpaceX’s leading Starlink and Starship engineers have shifted much of their focus to AI development. He said the move has significantly accelerated improvements to both Grok’s underlying model and its training infrastructure. Musk also disclosed that engineers from AI coding startup Cursor, which SpaceX recently agreed to acquire for $60 billion, are contributing to the effort, with the latest model partially trained using Cursor’s data.
Musk said Grok 4.5 is currently in private beta at both Tesla and SpaceX, adding that the company plans to release entirely new AI foundation models trained from scratch every month for the remainder of 2026. The aggressive schedule reflects SpaceX’s growing ambition to narrow the gap with leading AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The push follows a turbulent period for xAI, Musk’s AI venture founded in 2023. Earlier this year, the company underwent a major restructuring after several cofounders departed and Musk acknowledged that Grok had fallen behind competing models, particularly in coding performance. He previously said the AI system was being rebuilt “from the foundations up.”
SpaceX’s recent acquisition of Cursor marks a key part of that strategy. The deal gives the company access to Cursor’s AI coding expertise and training resources while allowing the startup to leverage SpaceX’s supercomputing infrastructure.
Looking ahead, Musk envisions AI becoming one of SpaceX’s largest business opportunities. Company investor materials estimate AI represents a $26.5 trillion market, and SpaceX plans to use Starship and Starlink technologies to eventually deploy a network of orbital data centers designed to train and run increasingly advanced AI models.
