SAN FRANCISCO — There is a quiet revolution happening inside the glass towers of Wall Street, and it's wearing Elon Musk's fingerprints.
Apollo Global Management and Morgan Stanley have both begun internal testing of xAI's Grok chatbot, evaluating it alongside other AI providers as they build out their enterprise AI strategies. Apollo manages over $650 billion in assets. Morgan Stanley is one of the most influential financial institutions on the planet. When they run a new AI system, it matters.
Grok 4.3: The Model Behind the Momentum
The version of Grok that Wall Street is now testing is Grok 4.3, launched on May 4, 2026. It is xAI's cost-efficient flagship model: built-in reasoning, a 1-million-token context window, and native video input. At $1.25 per million input tokens, it undercuts comparable models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The 1-million-token context window is particularly significant for financial services firms processing hundreds of pages of regulatory filings or legal contracts in a single query.
Grok Build: The Coding Agent That Changes Everything
On May 19, xAI launched Grok Build — a direct competitor to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Available to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers at $300 per month, Grok Build is a terminal-based agentic coding tool that lets developers generate code, navigate codebases, and complete complex programming tasks using natural language. Early testers described it as highly capable at multi-file refactoring, documentation generation, and test writing.
Third-Party Connectors: Grok as a Platform
Also launched this month: Grok's third-party connector system, enabling users to build and deploy via Vercel, design in Canva, create presentations in Gamma, and pull live market data from S&P Global — all without leaving Grok. Combined with Grok Skills, which give users persistent custom expertise across conversations, Grok is evolving from a chatbot into a full productivity platform.
The Bigger Picture
When Musk founded xAI in 2023, the company faced a seemingly insurmountable lead from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Two years later, xAI has a model that Wall Street's most sophisticated institutions are evaluating seriously and a coding agent competitive with the best in the field. The race for AI supremacy is far from over — but Grok is no longer a challenger. It's a contender.
