The Morning Download: Grok 4.5 Enters the AI Model Race

Good morning. The global race to develop new AI models is still heating up, and fully capable of delivering surprises.

Prior to the release of DeepSeek R-1 in January 2025, it seemed that U.S. companies were probably too security-conscious to deploy AI models from China. Now it appears that they are addicted to them, which is too bad, because Beijing is considering tightening its grip on homegrown technology, the Wall Street Journal reports. Chinese models from companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have become core to daily work at many American companies, offering a less costly alternative and supplement to the products of OpenAI and Anthropic, the Journal says.

There’s at least one new alternative on offer, though. Axios reported yesterday that “Elon Musk's SpaceXAI is launching Grok 4.5, its smartest model yet, and its first release since going public and acquiring the AI coding startup Cursor.”

Price-performance. Axios says that “SpaceXAI claims the new Grok outperforms some OpenAI and Anthropic models on speed, price and performance, but not the largest, latest models from those competitors.”

From SpaceXAI: “Grok 4.5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. The model also achieves roughly 2x the token efficiency of comparable leading models, solving tasks in under half the number of steps. Overall, Grok 4.5 delivers the highest intelligence per unit of time and cost.”

Snorkel AI, which helps frontier labs and AI teams develop specialized training data and environments, put Grok 4.5 to the test. “Grok 4.5 achieves a mean pass rate of 29% … surpassing the mean pass rates achieved by GPT 5.5 (22%) and Opus 4.8 (21%). The improvement is concentrated in domains that demand deep professional judgment,” such as legal work, education, healthcare and QA analysis, according to Snorkel, founded in 2019 by veterans of the Stanford AI Lab.

Tech leader takeaway. The long-anticipated commodification of AI models hasn’t arrived yet. China’s apparent willingness to scale back access to its models suggests leaders there believe those models offer something that is worth protecting. In the U.S., new models are emerging to fill a range of needs at various price points, from the middle range on up. The race to develop new models hasn’t settled into the relaxed Sunday 5k in the park, at least not yet. Companies need to understand how these models serve their purposes in a quickly evolving toolkit.

• Chinese AI companies are not sitting still, raising billions of dollars to compete with U.S. players, the WSJ reports. Early Thursday shares of DeepSeek rival Zhipu AI rose sharply after the company announced plans for a $4 billion fundraising to support growth.

• Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, is raising outside capital for the first time, working on a $10 billion round led by Coatue that would value the company at $130 billion, the WSJ reports.

• Home buyers in San Francisco are rushing to front-run anticipated IPOs from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, local real-estate agents tell the WSJ.  "I’ve got junior guys who are selling secondary shares and buying $10 million homes," says Phil Chen, a real-estate agent at Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.