Despite an ongoing legal clash with OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI is moving full steam ahead — officially launching API access for its flagship AI models: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini.
These latest offerings from xAI promise “reasoning capabilities,” image understanding, and deeper integration with X (formerly Twitter), the social platform Musk recently folded into the xAI umbrella. Grok 3 has been powering some of X’s AI features since its debut, but now, developers and enterprises can get direct access via API — for a price.
Here’s how the pricing breaks down:
- Grok 3:
$3 / million input tokens (~750,000 words)
$15 / million output tokens - Grok 3 Mini:
$0.30 / million input tokens
$0.50 / million output tokens
Fast-track versions of both are also available, but they’ll cost you:
- Grok 3 (High-Speed):
$5 / million input tokens
$25 / million output tokens - Grok 3 Mini (High-Speed):
$0.60 / million input tokens
$4 / million output tokens
In comparison, xAI’s pricing aligns closely with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, though it lands higher than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro — a model that’s consistently scored better than Grok 3 across key AI benchmarks. Critics have also flagged xAI’s own benchmark reporting as “misleading.”
And there’s more: Grok 3’s context window — the amount of text the model can consider at once — maxes out at 131,072 tokens (~97,500 words) via API. That’s a far cry from the 1 million tokens Musk claimed Grok 3 supported just weeks ago.
What sets Grok apart?
When Musk introduced Grok nearly two years ago, he promised an AI that was edgier, less filtered, and unafraid of “politically incorrect” takes. Earlier versions like Grok 2 lived up to that hype — dishing out profanity on command and skirting past the restrictions seen in competitors like ChatGPT.
Yet on political topics, Grok seemed to veer left — a fact confirmed by independent studies and quietly acknowledged by Musk. He blamed the model’s bias on publicly available training data and has since vowed to bring Grok closer to “political neutrality.”
xAI’s response? We’re still waiting to see whether Grok 3 has delivered on that shift. Though it’s clear the company is betting big on developer and enterprise adoption — especially as the AI arms race heats up.
