Elon Musk instructed Tesla staff to use Grok 4.5 for work where possible. The directive arrives days after the company imposed a $200 weekly cap on spending for rival AI tools.
Musk sent the memo to employees on Friday. It highlighted Grok 4.5’s lower token costs compared with models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
The cap on third-party tools exempts Grok, which is developed by xAI. Musk has folded xAI into SpaceX.
Grok 4.5 was released on Wednesday. On public benchmarks it ranks below several competing models, a gap Musk acknowledged in a post on X.
Tesla engineers have tested the model internally for months. Some staff members have continued to prefer Claude for daily tasks despite the new guidance.