Musk says SpaceX could reach AI 'pole position' in six months
Elon Musk said on X on Thursday that SpaceX could have a model comparable to Anthropic's Fable or OpenAI's GPT-6 within two to three months — and reach the industry's 'pole position' in about six months if its pace of improvement holds.
Elon Musk said on Thursday that SpaceX could develop an AI model comparable to Anthropic’s Claude Fable or OpenAI’s GPT-6 within two to three months, and potentially take the lead in the field within six months.
“I am cautiously optimistic that SpaceX will have a Fable/GPT-6 level model in 2 to 3 months,” Musk wrote on X. When a user replied that Anthropic and OpenAI could have better models by then, Musk answered: “We will keep accelerating… If our second derivative remains strong, SpaceX will reach pole position in about 6 months.”
Musk argued SpaceX’s AI effort is only three years old, compared with six for Anthropic and 10 for OpenAI, and singled out the company’s ability to bring large amounts of computing power online. “Hardware is hard,” he said, adding that SpaceX has shown it can do it rapidly.
The prediction follows a post from last week laying out a Grok roadmap: Grok 4.7 should be on par with Claude Opus 5.0, though not Opus 5.1; Grok 4.8 — a 2.5-trillion-parameter model trained on a new C++ software stack — was expected to finish its initial training that week before beginning reinforcement learning; Grok 4.9 would sit in the class of OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Fable; and Grok 5 might be “better than anything.”
Grok 4.7 arrived this week, with Musk citing an agentic-coding ranking that placed SpaceXAI third behind Anthropic and OpenAI, while arguing Grok’s speed and lower cost made it a strong “everyday workhorse.” Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5 this week, and OpenAI added GPT-6 Sol and Luna to its GPT-6 line-up. The comments came as preparations were underway for a White House AI banquet involving President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and technology executives including Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang and Sam Altman.
Musk’s forecast sets timelines, not a completed benchmark — the six-month estimate depends on SpaceX maintaining its current rate of improvement.
Sources
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