Musk’s Grok Is Out-Trading ChatGPT 40 to 1 Among Coinbase AI Agents

The Scoreboard

Coinbase doesn’t usually publish which chatbots its customers trade through, but this week it made a seeming exception. The exchange’s developer account shared a chart titled “Where agentic traders come from,” splitting notional trading volume by the large language model (LLM) client that sent each order between Sept. 14 and Sept. 21. The ranking was as follows:

1. Grok: 59.54%
2. Custom command-line interface (CLI) setups: 21.73%
3. Claude: 13.37%
4. Perplexity: 3.48%
5. ChatGPT: 1.54%
6. Claude Code: 0.35%

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong subsequently passed a one-line verdict, stating:

Grok is the leading client for agentic traders on Coinbase currently.

Wait, Why Is ChatGPT So Low?

When Coinbase unveiled Coinbase for Agents on June 11, ChatGPT and Claude were the launch partners. The product lets users authorize an AI assistant to trade spot crypto and derivatives, read market data and pay for services, all inside an isolated portfolio with spending caps and trade limits.

Three months later, the launch partners together account for under 15% of agent volume, and the more popular consumer chatbot has less than a sixtieth. A few reasons plausibly explain the gap, though Coinbase didn’t break them down.

Grok lives inside X, where crypto traders already spend their day, so the step from reading a market thread to asking an agent to act on it is short. The chart also measures dollar volume rather than users, so a handful of large Grok-driven traders could have been tilting the pie chart.

Stocks Just Joined the Menu

This week, Coinbase expanded agent trading to U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), offering thousands of listed names, 24/5 trading, fractional shares from $1 and zero commissions through Coinbase Capital Markets Corp. Setup takes as few as three clicks from Perplexity, Grok, ChatGPT or Claude.

Agents pay their own way through x402, Coinbase’s micropayment protocol, which has processed more than 230 million transactions, with over $54 million in volume. Even Blackrock has weighed in on that machine-payments race, arguing that bitcoin is losing the battle for AI payments without losing the war.

The guardrails are the other side of it: given Coinbase lets users set asset permissions, spending limits and per-action approvals, the kind of spending caps and circuit breakers security researchers have been urging for autonomous software.

Musk Is Now Paying Bot Builders, Too

Lastly, Grok’s lead arrived the same week X started paying people to build on it. Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt posted an email announcing Grok Bot Creator Rewards, a pilot that pays creators every two weeks based on how many people use their bots and how often. His message said he had earned $500 in the first two weeks.

To qualify, creators must post about their public bots on X at least twice per pay period and have X Money set up. Payouts currently run through X’s Original Content Rewards. Separate details shared on X describe it as an invite-only pilot starting in the U.S., where usage and repeat usage count and likes and impressions don’t.