Tools 2026-08-12

Musk's answer to the agent race: a bot with its own computer, its own logins, and no price of its own

SpaceXAI — the company formed when SpaceX absorbed xAI in May — put Grok Bot into public beta on 11 August. Each bot is given its own computer in the cloud, signs into the tools you already use, and works across apps and inboxes without needing an API, including services that never built one. Because the machine is remote, jobs keep running with your laptop shut, and the bot comes back only when something needs approval. Bots retain memory of past conversations and are meant to learn how a particular person likes things done. It is out on macOS, iOS, Windows and Linux, with Android to follow. There is no standalone subscription: access is bundled into SuperGrok Heavy at $300 a month, Cursor Ultra at $200 a month for individuals and Cursor Teams Premium at $120 per seat, with a waiting list for enterprises. Cursor is in that list because SpaceX agreed in June to buy its maker, Anysphere, for $60 billion in stock.

Why it mattersEvery large lab is now selling the same thing in a different wrapper: an agent that does not stop when you close the laptop. What distinguishes this one is the refusal to price it separately. Grok Bot exists to make the $200–$300 tiers worth buying, which tells you the economics — persistent agents cost too much per hour to sell cheaply, so they are being used as the reason to move people up a pricing ladder instead. It is also the first visible product of the Cursor purchase: a coding subscription and a general-purpose agent are now the same product line. The caveat worth holding on to is that an agent signing into your accounts and clicking through apps has your permissions, not its own, and beta software with your logins is a genuinely new category of risk.

#AI Agents

✓ Verified · 4 sources

Read in the app — free, in 9 languages

Apple Music will tell you when a song was made by a machine — but the uploader decides whether to say so
2026-08-21 DeepSeek's cheap workhorse can now see — and on agent tasks that need eyes it says it is close to Anthropic's best
2026-08-21 Stripe has just paid $7.5 billion for a model router. Days later Ramp built one and is giving it away until January.
2026-08-21 Meta's assistant is now a Mac app that reads your screen and types into any window — and what it sees can train the model
2026-08-21 One click on a news site now tells Google to show you more of it — and you stay on the page you were reading
2026-08-21

Musk's answer to the agent race: a bot with its own computer, its own logins, and no price of its own

Related stories