xAI Drops Antitrust Suit Against Apple; Musk Unveils 2.5T-Parameter Grok 4.8

Two developments converged at xAI this week. First, xAI and X Corp voluntarily dismissed with prejudice their antitrust lawsuit against Apple over alleged AI-competition harms, filed in Fort Worth, Texas — while pointedly continuing their parallel case against OpenAI. The Apple dismissal removes one front in Musk's multi-directional legal campaign, notable given Apple's fresh Gemini-powered Siri deal.

Second, on the model side, Musk announced Grok 4.8, a 2.5-trillion-parameter model built on xAI's newly rewritten C++ software stack, has completed pretraining and is entering reinforcement learning. Tellingly, xAI never shipped the repeatedly delayed Grok 4.7 — its current listed flagship remains Grok 4.6 ($2/$6 per million tokens, 500K context) — so 4.8 leapfrogs a version that never materialized. Musk further claimed Grok 5 will be xAI's first AGI model, offering no benchmarks or timeline.

Infrastructure continues to scale: xAI's Memphis Colossus facility is adding a fourth data center, and Fortune reported Musk sleeping on the factory floor amid the push.

The skeptical reaction was sharp. Developers noted the AGI claim arrives with zero benchmarks and a track record of missed releases (the vanished 4.7), and questioned how Musk squares aggressive scaling with his simultaneous endorsement of Anthropic's slowdown call. The persistent Groq-vs-Grok naming confusion continues to muddy spec comparisons. Watch for actual Grok 4.8 benchmarks once RL completes — until then the 2.5T parameter count is a number without a scorecard.