1 week Ago By Kyle Wiggers
Billionaire Elon Musk might’ve just been countersued by OpenAI . But that isn’t stopping his AI company, xAI, from making its flagship Grok 3 model available via an API . It has been several months since xAI unveiled Grok 3 , the company’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini .
Grok 3 can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on Musk’s social network, X, which not-so-coincidentally acquired xAI in March . xAI is offering two flavors of Grok 3 in its API: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini with “reasoning” capabilities. Grok 3 is priced at $3 per million tokens (~750,000 words) fed into the model and $15 per million tokens generated by the model.
As for Grok 3 Mini, it’s $0.30 per million input tokens and $.50 per million output tokens.
Speedier versions of Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini are available at a premium: $5/M input tokens, $25/M output tokens for Grok 3 and $.60/M input tokens, $4/M output tokens for Grok 3 Mini. Grok 3 isn’t exactly cheap relative to the competition.
It matches the pricing of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet , which also offers reasoning capabilities, and it’s more expensive than Google’s recently released Gemini 2.5 Pro , which achieves generally higher scores than Grok 3 across popular AI benchmarks.
(Not for nothing, xAI has been accused of being misleading in its Grok 3 benchmark reporting.) As several users on X pointed out , Grok 3 via xAI’s API also has a smaller context window than the model is allegedly capable of supporting. (“Context window” refers to how many tokens the model can process in one go.
) The API maxes out at 131,072 tokens, or roughly 97,500 words — short of the 1 million tokens xAI claimed that Grok 3 supported in late February. When Musk announced Grok roughly two years ago, he pitched the AI model as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-“woke” — in general, willing to answer controversial questions other AI systems won’t. He delivered on some of that promise.
Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok and Grok 2 would happily oblige, spewing colorful language you likely wouldn’t hear from ChatGPT . But Grok models prior to Grok 3 hedged on political subjects and wouldn’t cross certain boundaries . In fact, one study found that Grok leaned to the political left on topics like transgender rights, diversity programs, and inequality.
Musk has blamed the behavior on Grok’s training data — public web pages — and pledged to “shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” Short of high-profile mistakes like briefly censoring unflattering mentions of President Donald Trump and Musk , it’s not yet clear whether xAI has achieved that goal at the model level — and what the long-term consequences might be..
