Elon Musk is finally taking action.

On the AI programming track, OpenAI and Anthropic are moving faster and faster, while xAI seems to be falling behind. Musk has repeatedly claimed he wants to compete with Claude, but after several updates of the Grok4.X series, the performance looks impressive on paper, but in reality, it's somewhat disappointing, and the gap hasn't truly narrowed.

However, this time, he has a new card.

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Musk confirmed on X that a new version of Grok is coming. The internal code name for the ninth version of the base model has been completed, with a parameter scale as high as 1.5 trillion, and it is expected to be officially released within 3 to 4 weeks. He used the term "banger" to describe this update, showing great confidence—despite not releasing any specific benchmark data, how the actual performance will be remains to be seen once it goes live.

What is worth noting is the "recipe" for this training. Musk previously admitted that the existing Grok4.3 had data defects, and the new version will go through a special phase of supplementary training, absorbing a large amount of Cursor's code data to make up for the shortcomings. After building a solid knowledge base, it will then undergo repeated refinement through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL).

The key word here is Cursor. Not long ago, Musk has already reached a cooperation agreement with this popular coding tool, not only opening up computing resources, but also reports have surfaced about a potential acquisition at a price of around $20 billion. Both sides benefit—xAI gains access to massive high-quality code data, while Cursor gets strong computing power support, making it a typical complementary collaboration.

Whether it can really catch up with Claude is still too early to conclude. But at least this time, Musk has more than just a slogan in his hand.