xAI's grok-imagine-image-quality retires on 2026-11-02 (60-day notice given 9/2). After that date, every request is silently redirected to grok-imagine-image-2.0 with quality forced to low, dropping the price from $0.05 to $0.04 per image (↓20%). The catch: grok-imagine-image-2.0 itself doesn't price by quality tier — anyone who migrates proactively and explicitly sets quality: medium gets better output at the exact same price, while anyone who just waits for the redirect gets stuck on the lowest tier.
Grok 4.7 shipped 2026-09-21 as `grok-4.7`: a new, larger base model with longer RL training; 500K-token context window; API pricing unchanged at $2.00 input / $6.00 output per 1M tokens (rising to $4.00/$12.00 above 200K tokens). xAI's own Terminal-Bench 4.0 score jumps from 20.3% to 38.0%, but Artificial Analysis's independent re-test puts it at only 26% — well behind GPT-6 Astra (60%) and Claude Fable 5.1 (55%). It rolled out to all GitHub Copilot plans the same day. For agent builders, it's a 3-8x cheaper option for agentic coding, but complex autonomous terminal work still warrants independent benchmarking before you rely on it.
xAI's official pricing docs announced that starting 2026-09-21 12:00 PT, the Grok API's `x_search` tool switches from a flat $5 per 1,000 tool calls to $5 per 1,000 posts fetched plus $10 per 1,000 user profiles fetched — and parent/quoted posts returned inside a thread count toward that total. Other tools like `web_search` and `code_execution` stay at a flat $5 per 1,000 calls. Light queries that return only a handful of results are barely affected, but social-monitoring agents that pull full threads and average dozens of posts per query could see their bill go up, not down.
Grok is xAI's LLM family: founded July 2023, opened with a 314B MoE under Apache 2.0 in March 2024, and two and a half years later spans Grok 4.6 (500K, $2/$6, four reasoning levels), Grok 4 Fast (2M), Imagine for image/video, and Grok Build for terminal coding — its moat is distribution (X / grok.com / Tesla / Bedrock), not single-model supremacy. This post traces Grok 1→4.6, sub-line positioning, pricing, and licensing traps.
Grok Build is xAI's Rust coding agent — 845K LOC, 8 parallel sub-agents, Arena Mode. May 2026 beta, July open-sourced (Apache 2.0) — but the direct trigger for open-sourcing was a privacy incident: it silently uploaded entire repos (including SSH keys, .env files) to Google Cloud Storage at a 27,800x traffic ratio. The exfiltration code remains in the binary, disabled only by a server-side flag.
Grok 4.6: 500K-token context window, $2 input / $6 output per 1M tokens (same as 4.5), AA Intelligence Index 61 (tied with GPT-5.6 Sol Max), GDPVal-AA v2 1753 Elo (highest overall), but DeepSWE and Terminal-Bench still trail GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5