SpaceXAI Open-Sources Grok Build Under Apache 2.0 as Anthropic Pays $1.25 Billion Monthly for Compute
Updated
Updated · The New Stack · Jul 18
SpaceXAI Open-Sources Grok Build Under Apache 2.0 as Anthropic Pays $1.25 Billion Monthly for Compute
3 articles · Updated · The New Stack · Jul 18
Summary
Wednesday’s release made Grok Build—a terminal coding agent competing with Claude Code and Codex—free under an Apache 2.0 license, a move aimed at pressuring rivals on pricing and usage limits.
Bloomberg reported Anthropic pays SpaceXAI $1.25 billion a month for compute, part of roughly $2.3 billion in monthly infrastructure deals, letting Musk undercut coding-agent rivals while still profiting from their growth.
SpaceXAI had spare capacity to support that strategy: its own models used just 11% of available computing power in April, even as Anthropic reportedly faced a compute crunch.
The open-source push also followed a backlash after developers found Grok Build was uploading entire directories to SpaceXAI’s cloud; Musk said the data would be deleted.
Code released with the project showed tooling ported from Codex and OpenCode, underscoring how portable the coding-agent layer is even as xAI faces internal turmoil and trust issues.