AI Mindset · Model Cheatsheets
Grok

The Fast, Real-Time Operator With an Edge

xAI can rewrite a page you already copied a number from, and tell nobody. That’s the thing to plan around here. The model itself has barely moved since August 12, 2026, when Grok 4.6 took over from Grok 4.5 and kept every figure around it. Same $2 per 1M input and $6 per 1M output below 200,000 tokens. Same 500k context window. Nothing has replaced it, and as of September 18, 2026 there’s no 4.7, no 5 and no new mini variant. What moved is distribution. Grok now sits on six third-party surfaces, and the newest one shuts out the EU, EFTA and the UK while the others don’t. Two first-party contradictions that were live in early September were fixed in silence, with no notice on either page. So the risk here isn’t the model. It’s your own notes.

Verified September 18, 2026Grok 4.6 · August 12$2/$6 below 200k tokensFour surfaces in twelve daysGrok Bot governance controls · September 3Voice 1.0 removed with no noticeFrontier Program · September 12 · EU, EFTA and UK excludedImagine quality tier retires November 2
1 / Meet Grok

The colleague closest to the live conversation

Some questions change by the hour. That’s Grok’s window. And the edge isn’t the cheeky tone everyone talks about. It’s live X context, frontier reasoning, coding agents and media production sitting in one place.

Personality

Direct, fast and current

Grok will take a position. That helps when you’re trying to make sense of a live event. It hurts when the confidence runs ahead of the evidence.

  • Real-time social context
  • Strong engineering orientation
  • Less polished corporate default tone
Deploy it for

Live signal and high-velocity execution

Breaking narratives. Market reaction. Technical work, rapid prototyping, coding agents, and image and video experiments in the same window.

  • What’s happening now
  • What developers are saying now
  • What can be built or rendered quickly
Choose Grok when

Recency or candor changes the answer

Reach for Grok when yesterday’s summary isn’t enough. Or when the social reaction is part of the evidence. Or when a blunt stress test makes the work better.

  • Live pulse
  • Direct critique
  • Fast action through Build or Imagine

Live signal or verified fact?

The habit that matters most here’s keeping these two things apart.

What are people saying?
Use X as a live signal

Map the loudest narratives, who is driving them, where they disagree and how fast attention is moving.

  • Directional, not representative
  • Useful for emerging language
  • Expect manipulation and selection bias
Narrative map
Map the three dominant narratives about this announcement on X. Show who is driving each one, what evidence they cite and where the narratives disagree. Don’t decide which is true yet.
Verification pass
Now verify the factual core against the company release, filing and any other primary source. Separate confirmed facts, disputed interpretation and unsupported social claims.
2 / What’s Current

The flagship stopped moving and the distribution started

The model stopped. The distribution didn’t. Grok 4.6 has been the flagship since August 12, 2026, at the same price and the same context window. Nothing has replaced it. No 4.7, no 5 and no new mini variant as of September 18, 2026. What changed is where Grok runs and what sits around it. It reached GitHub Copilot on August 14, Amazon Bedrock on August 19, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform on August 21 and Microsoft Foundry on August 26. Grok was already listed on Bedrock and Databricks back in June. Grok Bot went from a three-tier early beta to eight subscription plans, picked up an X integration, and on September 3 picked up enterprise access, network and audit controls. Grok Build got persistent memory on September 16. Then a sixth route opened that xAI had no hand in at all. Microsoft put Grok into Word, Excel and PowerPoint through its Frontier Program on September 12, 2026. It’s disabled by default and closed to the EU, EFTA and the UK during the preview. Two things about xAI’s own pages sit underneath all of it. Five model cards hang off the safety page across two hosts, and one of those hosts returns 404 on its index paths while serving the card files beneath them. And two first-party contradictions that were live in early September were corrected silently, with no dated notice on either page. · Source for the Frontier Program route: the sibling Microsoft 365 Copilot guide in this published set, because no dated xAI article covers it

$2 / $6
API input and output price per 1M tokens below 200,000 tokens; xAI lists “$4 / $1 / $12 above”
500k
Grok 4.6 context window, unchanged from Grok 4.5
3 answers
First-party pages giving a different Grok 4.6 knowledge cutoff: the docs model reference says February 1, 2026, the model card says pretraining to January 2026 with supplemental data as late as June 2026, and the dedicated 4.6 model page states none
4 surfaces
Third-party surfaces carrying Grok 4.6: GitHub Copilot (August 14), Amazon Bedrock (August 19), the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (August 21) and Microsoft Foundry (August 26), twelve days end to end; Databricks has carried Grok since June 18
8 plans
Subscription plans that now include Grok Bot, up from three at the August 11 launch
Nov 2, 2026
Retirement date for grok-imagine-image-quality; requests then move to grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality

Grok 4.6 Flagship · August 12

Out on August 12, 2026, and still xAI’s current model on September 18, 2026. Price and context didn’t move from Grok 4.5. You pay $2 per 1M input and $6 per 1M output below 200,000 tokens, with a 500k context window. Cross 200,000 tokens and the price table hands you a higher tier. Three xAI pages describe this one model three different ways, so name the page whenever you quote one. The knowledge cutoff gets a card of its own, because it isn’t settled.

  • Pin grok-4.6 rather than a moving alias
  • Long-context requests cross into a higher price tier at 200,000 tokens, which xAI documents as “$4 / $1 / $12 above”
  • Long context pricing bills the long-context rates for all tokens in the request
  • The docs model reference calls it “Our flagship model for code and everything else”; x.ai/api and the dedicated 4.6 model page each carry a different one-line description
  • Model card dated August 12, 2026, revision 2026-08-17, re-verified September 18, 2026

Grok 4.5 Prior generation

Superseded on August 12, 2026. Until then it was xAI’s strongest model, trained alongside Cursor on NVIDIA GB300s. Elon Musk pitched it as an Opus-class model that’s faster, cheaper and easier on tokens. That’s vendor positioning, not a finding. And yes, it has a model card.

  • 500k context window
  • Treat the knowledge cutoff as source-dependent, as on 4.6
  • Vendor claims: about 80 tokens/sec and about 4.2x token efficiency
  • A model card exists, dated July 14, 2026 with a July 20 revision, linked from the safety page and hosted on media.x.ai

Four surfaces in twelve days Distribution

Grok 4.6 landed on GitHub Copilot on August 14, 2026. Then Amazon Bedrock on August 19, alongside Grok Build on web and mobile. Then the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform on August 21 and Microsoft Foundry on August 26. Four third-party surfaces in twelve days, and the wave starts at Copilot, not at Bedrock. Count from Bedrock and you lose a surface and flip the order. Bedrock wasn’t new in August either. xAI published a Grok on Amazon Bedrock listing on June 17, 2026 and Grok on Databricks on June 18. So Databricks is a fifth catalog, it predates the August wave, and only Grok 4.6 on Bedrock was new. Either way the buying question changes. Plenty of organizations can now get Grok through a contract they already signed, without ever signing one with xAI.

  • GitHub Copilot August 14, Bedrock August 19, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform August 21, Microsoft Foundry August 26
  • Grok reached Bedrock on June 17, 2026 and Databricks on June 18, 2026
  • Copilot access may need enabling in Copilot settings on business and enterprise tenants, as xAI noted at launch
  • Check which entity holds the data terms on each platform

Grok in Word, Excel and PowerPoint through the Microsoft Frontier Program September 12 · EU, EFTA and UK excluded

The sixth surface is the one xAI didn’t announce. Microsoft put Grok into Word, Excel and PowerPoint through its Frontier Program. Not Cowork. Not Copilot Studio. Access sits behind a dedicated admin setting that’s off by default. And Grok isn’t available to Frontier customers in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and the United Kingdom during the preview. No end date is given. The gate, the regions and the data terms on this route belong to Microsoft, not to xAI.

  • Word, Excel and PowerPoint only: not Cowork and not Copilot Studio
  • A dedicated administrative setting, disabled by default, controls access
  • EU, EFTA and UK customers are excluded during the preview, with no published end date
  • A different mechanism from xAI’s own Office add-ins: see the Workplace Add-Ins section
  • Source: the sibling Microsoft 365 Copilot guide in this series, which records the Microsoft post “Expanding model choice in Copilot with Grok” by xiasong, published September 12, 2026 and updated September 14; no dated xAI article covers it, so it’s attributed rather than cited below

Three first-party answers on one cutoff Read the source, not the number

Grok 4.6’s knowledge cutoff depends on which xAI page you happen to open. The docs model reference says February 1, 2026. The model card says pretraining to January 2026, plus data generated as late as June 2026 in supplemental training. The dedicated model page says nothing at all. February 1 is the one written as a plain date, which makes it the easiest to lift and the easiest to treat as settled. It isn’t settled. Quote a cutoff with the page it came from, and don’t hang a recency assumption on it.

  • Docs model reference: February 1, 2026
  • Model card: pretraining to January 2026, supplemental data to June 2026
  • Dedicated 4.6 model page at docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.6: no cutoff stated
  • The docs pages are rewritten in place, so confirm directly

An announced price with no model to buy Contradiction

xAI announced a fast variant of Grok 4.6 at twice the price. Then never shipped an ID for it. The August 12, 2026 announcement puts pricing at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, and says the fast variant costs double. No model ID with the word fast in it appears anywhere on the docs price table, and the dedicated 4.6 model page names no variant either. You can’t put a budget line against a model you can’t name.

  • Announced August 12, 2026 at twice the standard rate
  • The seven price-table rows are grok-4.6, grok-build-0.1, grok-4.5, grok-4.3, grok-4.20-multi-agent-0309, grok-4.20-0309-reasoning and grok-4.20-0309-non-reasoning
  • No model ID, context window or pricing row on any surface
  • Don’t commit a fast-variant budget line until an ID exists
  • Price table read on a docs page rewritten in place: confirm directly

The Cursor connection Strategic · same owner

Cursor and xAI are now sister companies, and that changes how you read everything they say about each other. The sequence matters more than any one date. They announced a partnership in April 2026. On July 8, 2026 they shipped together. On August 14, 2026 Cursor said SpaceX had acquired it, finishing the process that started in April. No terms, no valuation. SpaceX had already acquired xAI on February 2, 2026. So the training relationship here’s inside one group, not arm’s length. Nothing further has been published first-party since August 14. Targeted searches on September 18, 2026 turned up only plan bundling, and the xAI news index carries no corporate item later than February 2, 2026. Record that as not found, not as nothing happened.

  • Cursor has been SpaceX-owned since August 14, 2026, with no terms disclosed
  • Partnership announced April 2026, joint Grok 4.5 release July 8, acquisition completed August 14
  • July 8 wording: xAI said Grok 4.5 “was trained alongside Cursor,” on NVIDIA GB300s, and Cursor said “Today we are releasing Grok 4.5 together with SpaceXAI, our most intelligent model”
  • August 14 wording: Cursor posted that it “has officially been acquired by SpaceX,” completing “the acquisition process that started in April, when we announced our partnership with SpaceXAI to accelerate our model training efforts”
  • No further first-party detail found as of September 18, 2026, which isn’t the same as none existing
  • A buyer evaluating Grok or Cursor should know both products now share an owner

Grok Bot Eight plans · enterprise controls

Grok Bot looks generally available. xAI has never said it’s. It launched August 11, 2026 in early beta for three tiers. By August 26 it covered eight plans. On August 29 it gained an X integration that xAI calls the first version. On September 3 it gained access, network and audit controls so enterprises can govern Bots at scale, and xAI claimed thousands of organizations had adopted it. None of those posts uses the word beta. None of them says it left beta either. So widen your availability claim to the named plans, and stop short of calling it GA. Governance features and an adoption number are strong circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence isn’t a vendor statement.

  • Eight named plans, up from three: SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Pro, Cursor Pro+, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Standard and Premium
  • Access, network and audit controls for enterprises since September 3, 2026
  • Adoption and isolation statements are vendor claims
  • No first-party statement that it has left beta: don’t claim GA
  • Sources: “Grok Bot is now included with more plans,” August 26, 2026; “Grok Bot now works with X,” August 29; “Grok Bot for Enterprise,” September 3

Grok Build Coding agent

A terminal CLI agent, and on web and mobile since August 19, 2026. Plan mode lets you approve, annotate or rewrite the plan before anything runs. Bigger tasks get handed to parallel subagents in their own worktrees. And since September 16, 2026 it keeps memory between sessions as markdown files on disk. The open question is who is entitled to it. No x.ai page says which plans grant access. The pricing page never mentions X Premium or X Premium+, and X Premium pricing lives on x.com rather than on any xAI surface. So the widely repeated claim that X Premium Plus includes Grok Build has no first-party support. Confirm the plan before you promise it to anyone.

  • Approve the plan before it runs
  • Parallel subagents and worktree integration
  • Persistent memory across sessions since September 16, 2026
  • X Premium Plus entitlement is unconfirmed on any x.ai page

EU availability isn’t one answer Per surface

One date settled one surface, and people keep quoting it for all of them. Grok 4.5 wasn’t available in EU products or the API console at launch. That gap closed on July 17, 2026, when the developer release notes recorded Grok 4.5 as available to EU users in the API console. Read it for exactly what it covers. One model. xAI’s own API console. July. It isn’t the EU position everywhere, and at least one surface is shut today. Grok reached Word, Excel and PowerPoint through the Microsoft Frontier Program on September 12, 2026, and Frontier customers in the EU, EFTA and the UK are excluded during the preview, with no end date. Anyone who treats July 17 as settled and then switches Grok on in Word will be wrong about the region they’re standing in.

  • July 17, 2026 covers Grok 4.5 on xAI’s API console, not every surface
  • The Microsoft Frontier Program route excludes the EU, EFTA and the UK during the preview, with no end date
  • Each third-party catalog carries its own regions and terms
  • Establish EU access per surface and per model before promising it
  • Source for the Frontier exclusion: the sibling Microsoft 365 Copilot guide in this series

Skills and connectors

Grok can build documents, decks and spreadsheets, and it can reach external systems through reusable skills and integrations.

  • Persistent expertise
  • Business workflow automation
  • Permission-aware enterprise use

Office and Workspace add-ins

xAI ships its own free add-ins, and they put Grok inside PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, Sheets, Slides and Docs. That takes the work story well past X and grok.com. The program started in June 2026, not July. Keep this route apart from the Microsoft Frontier Program route dated September 12, 2026. They reach three of the same Office apps by different mechanisms, with different gates and different regional terms.

  • Draft and revise documents
  • Turn outlines into slides
  • Not the same thing as Grok in Copilot through the Frontier Program
  • Keep tone and source review explicit
  • See the Workplace Add-Ins section for the dated releases and the comparison

How Grok 4.5 rolled out, kept as a worked example

Grok 4.5 is the prior generation now. Its rollout is still the clearest first-party case of why one release date doesn’t describe what shipped. Name the stage that matches the surface you’re buying. Expect Grok 4.6 to land on surfaces at its own pace too, the way the August cloud releases did.

API
API availability

The xAI developer release notes date Grok 4.5 on the API to July 8, 2026. That’s the earliest first-party date on record for the model.

  • Developer surface first
  • Source: docs.x.ai release notes
  • Not yet a consumer release

Choose the Grok surface

The right product depends on whether the job is intelligence, engineering, creation or enterprise context.

Research and live signal
Grok app or grok.com

Use the main assistant for current search, conversation, analysis and quick creation.

  • Search and X context
  • Model selection
  • Skills and connectors
3 / Grok Build

A coding agent designed for speed and sustained work

Grok Build moves the product from advice into doing. The /goal command, the session dashboard and the plugin system make the unit of work an outcome, not a run of terminal prompts. Two dates change what a security review looks like. Since July 15, 2026 the agent itself is open source, so a reviewer can read it instead of trusting a description. And since September 16, 2026 it writes memory to disk between sessions, so that review has more ground to cover.

A reliable /goal workflow

Long-running autonomy needs a short contract you can inspect.

Define
Describe the end state

Name the feature or the repair, the system it touches, the constraints you won’t bend, and the evidence that proves it’s done.

  • Use repository-specific instructions
  • State forbidden changes
  • Include tests

Open source July 15

xAI open-sourced Grok Build: the agent loop, the developer tools, the terminal interface and the skills, plugins, hooks, MCP and subagent systems. That changes what a security review can actually see. One catch. The announcement page doesn’t state a license, so check the terms in the repository before you build on it.

  • Enables local-first use with your own inference
  • Read the agent loop instead of trusting a description
  • License not stated on the announcement, so verify it
  • Repository: github.com/xai-org/grok-build

Web and mobile August 19

Grok Build reached web and mobile on August 19, 2026, the same day Grok 4.6 reached Amazon Bedrock. A coding agent that’s no longer terminal-only is a governance change, not just a convenience, right? The group who can start a long-running agent just got a lot bigger than the group with a configured CLI.

  • Not terminal-only any more
  • Decide who may launch agents from a phone
  • Keep repository permissions as the real control

/goal Long running

A command for handing over a sustained outcome instead of driving every agent turn by hand. This is the CLI’s long-running execution mode, and it isn’t the same thing as consumer Automations.

  • Good for bounded projects
  • Requires completion criteria
  • Use stop conditions

Agent dashboard

Run many coding sessions, watch progress, answer questions and send out more work.

  • Parallel engineering
  • Central supervision
  • Avoid duplicate changes

Plugin marketplace

Extend Grok Build with packaged tools and workflows inside the coding environment.

  • Review plugin trust
  • Pin required versions
  • Keep permissions narrow

Composer 2.5

A specialized coding model you can pick inside Grok Build for fast software tasks.

  • Use the model menu
  • Benchmark on your repository
  • Don’t assume the flagship is always the best route

External coding integrations

Grok subscriptions or models can work through environments such as Warp, Kilo Code and OpenCode.

  • Know which tool owns execution
  • Check data terms
  • Keep configuration documented

Memory September 16

Grok Build now writes notes to disk and keeps them. xAI describes them as conventions, decisions and project facts, stored as markdown, scoped per project workspace and globally. The /memory command opens a read-only browser of the files, and /dream sorts notes into topic files. xAI says it deliberately leaves out task state, temporary conclusions and secrets. Take that as design intent, not as something you’ve tested. Memory applies to new sessions, so run /new or start a fresh grok to pick it up.

  • Per-project and global scope, stored as markdown on disk
  • Read the stored files with /memory before trusting what the agent remembers
  • A new artifact that follows a repository around, and a new thing to review when someone leaves
  • Applies to new sessions only

Build Mode July 28

xAI shipped Build Mode on July 28, 2026 in a dated article of its own, not in the release notes. Easy to miss if the release notes are how you track Build. Check how it behaves with plan mode and with the permissions you’ve already set before you write a workflow around it.

  • A dated first-party release, not a release note
  • Confirm its current behavior in the product
  • Re-test any Build workflow written before July 28

Workflows July 23

Workflows in Grok Build shipped on July 23, 2026, also in its own dated article. It belongs in the same inventory as /goal, plugins and, since September, memory. That inventory is the list of things a Build installation can start, carry or remember without anyone typing the next prompt.

  • Dated July 23, 2026
  • Inventory it alongside /goal, plugins and memory
  • Decide who may create and share one

Grok Build API grok-build-0.1

A public-beta API path lets developers wire the coding model into their own workflows. Both the model and the price are published this time, which isn’t something you can take for granted here.

  • Model ID grok-build-0.1, 256k context window, listed as a priced text model on the docs price table
  • $1.00 input, $0.20 cached input and $2.00 output per 1M tokens at short context; $2.00, $0.40 and $4.00 at long context
  • Beta stability: evaluate and instrument before you depend on it
  • Prices read from a docs page rewritten in place, so confirm directly
Feature goal
Implement organization-wide audit logging for authentication changes. Follow existing architecture, add migration-safe storage, update API and admin UI, write abuse-case tests, and finish only when all checks pass.
Repository review
Inspect this repository for the highest-risk authentication and authorization flaws. Don’t change code yet. Rank findings by exploitability and show the exact evidence behind each one.
Parallel plan
Split this migration into independent workstreams that can run safely in parallel. Identify shared files, sequencing constraints and the final integration test before dispatching sessions.
Completion report
Report only: files changed, user-visible behavior, tests run, security implications, unresolved issues and the exact review I should perform before merge.
4 / Live Intelligence

Use X as a sensor, not a source of universal truth

X will tell you what people are saying faster than anything else. It will also tell you what bots are saying, what campaigns are pushing and what a confident stranger got wrong. Same feed, right? So treat it as a sensor and not as a source. Since August 29 Grok Bot works with X directly, which puts an agent on that same surface.

Early signal

Narrative emergence

See which explanations and phrases are spreading before they reach formal analysis.

Market pulse

Real-time sentiment

Track reaction to products, earnings, policy and events while people are still arguing about them.

Expert network

Practitioner commentary

Find the engineers, researchers, operators and witnesses closest to an event.

Distribution

Attention dynamics

See who is amplifying a claim and how fast it moves through communities.

Bias

Not representative

X users and visible posts aren’t a census of your customers, voters or professionals.

Manipulation

Coordinated activity

Bots, incentives and campaigns can manufacture the look of consensus or urgency.

Verification

Primary records still win

Use releases, filings, transcripts, source data and direct evidence for factual claims.

Time

Recency decays quickly

Capture the date and time, because a real-time answer can go stale within hours.

How much confidence should the signal earn?

Move the answer only when the evidence gets better.

One viral post
Very low confidence

Treat it as a lead. Write the claim down and go looking for the direct source.

  • High manipulation risk
  • No representativeness
  • Don’t publish as fact
5 / Imagine

Image, video, speech and audio are becoming one creative stack

One pass now gives you motion, physics, ambience, sound effects and speech. Imagine Video 1.5 does all of it together, and it gained a References release on July 31, 2026. The image side moved to 2.0 on August 7, 2026, then took an API update on August 28. Faster experiments, yes. It also bundles several quality risks into one output, so a single clip can fail in four ways at once. Three lifecycle facts belong in a calendar. The voice alias repriced itself on August 5, 2026. grok-voice-think-fast-1.0 then vanished from the price table with no dated notice. And grok-imagine-image-quality retires on November 2, 2026.

Imagine image API, August 28 Parameter change

A changed default is a silent change in what comes out. The August 28, 2026 release notes add an auto quality parameter on grok-imagine-image-2.0 and move the default from medium to auto. Editing now takes up to 5 source images, up from 3, and two aspect ratios were added: “21:9 (cinematic widescreen) and 5:2 (wide banners).” Re-run your reference prompts. Don’t assume parity.

  • Default moved from medium to auto
  • Up to 5 source images for editing, up from 3
  • New 21:9 and 5:2 aspect ratios

Grok Imagine Image Quality Retires November 2

The dedicated quality endpoint stops being its own model on November 2, 2026. Requests keep working. They just get served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 with quality set to low, at a lower per-image price. Cheaper output at lower quality with no error is the kind of change that reaches a brand review before it reaches an engineer.

  • Migrate deliberately rather than being migrated
  • Set the quality parameter explicitly on 2.0
  • Add a visual regression check before November

Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 Live since August 5

This is what grok-voice-latest has served since August 5, 2026. The docs price table now names the speech-to-speech row inline as grok-voice-think-fast-2.0 at $0.08 per minute, which works out at $4.80 per hour. That’s stronger evidence than guessing the current model from what the alias seems to serve.

  • Announced July 29, 2026 at $0.08 per minute of audio plus $0.004 per text input
  • Priced per minute of audio, not per token
  • Named inline on the price table, so the current model is no longer an inference
  • Budget the hourly rate for anything conversational

Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0 Removed, not deprecated

The previous voice model, and a good lesson in reading a page twice. On September 3, 2026 the docs marked it [Deprecated] at $0.05 per minute of audio, with the same $0.004 per text input. That read like a rate you could still get by naming the version. The page no longer supports that. As of September 18, 2026 the Voice API section has three rows, speech to speech, speech to text and text to speech, and grok-voice-think-fast-1.0 is in none of them and carries no deprecation marking. No dated retirement notice was published anywhere. Whether the model still answers couldn’t be established: its own model page returned the generic docs shell rather than a page or a 404, and absence from an index isn’t proof of absence. Either way, stop planning on $0.05.

  • Gone from the price table with no dated retirement notice
  • No longer marked [Deprecated] anywhere
  • Still callable or not: unresolved, because the model page didn’t render
  • Budget at the 2.0 rate and migrate deliberately

Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 September 17 · opt-in

The only model release between September 3 and September 18, 2026. It’s also the alias hazard running backwards. The new model ships opt-in while the alias keeps serving the old one, so nothing changes on your invoice and nothing improves either until someone names the new ID.

  • The September 17, 2026 release notes say you can use grok-voice-transcribe-1.0 or grok-voice-transcribe-2.0, and that the default is still grok-voice-transcribe-1.0
  • Default is still 1.0: you get 2.0 only by naming it
  • A stub model page exists with modalities audio and text and region us-east-1, and its Pricing heading is present but empty
  • No row on the price table, no dated article, no published price on any surface yet
  • Release notes are rewritten in place, so confirm directly
  • Benchmark 2.0 against 1.0 before switching a transcription pipeline

Imagine Video 1.5 June 16

Better motion, better physics, synchronized audio and clearer speech. Released June 16, 2026, then extended by Imagine Video 1.5 with References on July 31, 2026. xAI describes making videos from text or image references with preset voices, up to 1080p.

  • Quality and Fast modes
  • References release dated July 31, 2026
  • Product and API access
  • Library search for generated media

Documented video resolutions and rates

xAI lists 480p, 720p and 1080p output. The rates are $0.08 per second at 480p, $0.14 at 720p and $0.25 at 1080p.

  • At the listed rate, six seconds of 1080p is $1.50 of generation
  • Choose the resolution the channel actually needs
  • A living docs page, so re-check the rates before you budget

Video 1.5 Fast

Six-second 720p clips in about 25 seconds, according to xAI.

  • Rapid iteration
  • Useful for social and concepts
  • Inspect every clip for sync and warping

Audio and speech

Sound effects, ambience and dialogue come out with the video instead of arriving as a separate first pass.

  • Faster concepting
  • Voice and brand risk
  • Still needs final sound review

Imagine Image 2.0 August 7

The image side moved to version 2.0 on August 7, 2026 and gained new parameters on August 28. New version, new output. Re-test any prompt library or brand guardrail you built against the old one before you assume the pictures still match.

  • New version, new output characteristics
  • Re-run your reference prompts
  • Re-check text, likeness and product truth

Voice APIs

xAI offers speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice-agent tools and custom voice work, and shipped 21 new flagship Grok voices on July 6, 2026. The Voice Agent Builder is still marked Beta.

  • Multilingual workflows
  • 21 flagship voices since July 6, 2026
  • Consent and impersonation controls
  • Secure voice assets

The integrated media workflow

Don’t let fast rendering replace creative control.

Concept
Define the communication job

Write down the audience, the message, the visual idea and the job the audio is doing. Do that before you generate anything.

  • One central idea
  • Channel and duration
  • Rights and consent constraints
6 / Workplace Add-Ins

Grok moved into Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

The add-in program started in June, not July. Grok for PowerPoint shipped on June 16, 2026 and Grok for Word on June 18. Then Excel on July 20, Outlook on July 21 and Google Workspace on July 24. The July releases are the ones people noticed. They aren’t the beginning, and a policy written around them was written around the wrong date. Grok now sits beside the documents your teams already work in, on surfaces Microsoft and Google own. Since August it also sits inside those companies’ model catalogs and inside GitHub Copilot. And since September 12, 2026 a second, completely separate mechanism reaches Word, Excel and PowerPoint, this one run by Microsoft through its Frontier Program. This section keeps the two apart, because they share nothing but the app names. Treat all of it as a distribution decision, not just a feature release.

Grok for PowerPoint June 16

The first add-in in the program, out on June 16, 2026, about a month before the July wave people remember. If your add-in policy was written around the July dates, it was written around the wrong beginning.

  • The add-in program starts here, not in July
  • Confirm the tenant add-in policy before any rollout
  • Review what the add-in may read from a deck

Grok for Word June 18

Two days later, on June 18, 2026, drafting and revision arrived beside the open document.

  • Second in the program, ahead of Excel
  • Drafting and revision beside the open document
  • Review connector scope with your Microsoft 365 admin

Grok for Excel July 20

A free Microsoft 365 add-in. Ask a spreadsheet questions in plain English, get formulas back, and run scenarios and forecasts against the open workbook.

  • Plain-English queries over your data
  • Formula generation and scenario runs
  • Connectors for SharePoint, Drive and email

Grok for Outlook July 21

Thread summaries, reply drafts matched to how you write, and inbox triage inside Outlook. Who is entitled to it’s unconfirmed. No x.ai page says which paid plans include it. The pricing page never mentions X Premium or X Premium+, and X plan entitlements live on x.com rather than on any xAI surface. So the common claim that every paid X and SuperGrok user gets it has no first-party support.

  • Entitlement unconfirmed: no x.ai page states which paid plans include it
  • Style-matched draft replies
  • Review drafts before sending, because the tone is imitated rather than verified

Grok in Google Workspace July 24

One free add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace that puts Grok beside the open file in Sheets, Slides and Docs.

  • A single add-on covers all three apps
  • Installed through the Marketplace
  • Confirm your admin allows Marketplace installs

Two separate routes reach Word, Excel and PowerPoint Don’t merge them

Same three Office apps. Two mechanisms that share nothing but the app names. The first is xAI’s own: free add-ins dated June 16 to July 24, 2026, installed from the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace marketplaces and governed by your tenant add-in policy. The second is Microsoft’s. Grok reaches Word, Excel and PowerPoint through the Microsoft Frontier Program, behind a dedicated admin setting that’s off by default. Frontier customers in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and the United Kingdom are excluded during the preview, with no end date given. It isn’t Cowork and not Copilot Studio. Different owner. Different gate. Different regional terms. Same app names, right? And only one of the two is closed to European users today. A policy written about one of them doesn’t cover the other, and anyone who merges them gets both the gate and the geography wrong.

  • xAI add-ins: June 16 to July 24, 2026, marketplace install, tenant add-in policy
  • Frontier Program: September 12, 2026, a Microsoft admin setting that’s disabled by default
  • Only the Frontier route carries an EU, EFTA and UK exclusion, and it has no published end date
  • Ask which of the two a team means before you approve or forbid it
  • Source for the Frontier route: the sibling Microsoft 365 Copilot guide in this series, recording “Expanding model choice in Copilot with Grok” by xiasong, published September 12, 2026 and updated September 14

Grok inside the rival catalogs June to August

Grok 4.6 has been in GitHub Copilot since August 14, 2026, Amazon Bedrock since August 19, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform since August 21 and Microsoft Foundry since August 26. Grok has been on Databricks since June 18, 2026 and on Bedrock since June 17. Add-ins put Grok next to the documents. Catalog listings put it inside the platform contract. Either route can bring Grok into a company without a decision from whoever owns AI policy.

  • Four surfaces carried Grok 4.6 in twelve days, and two catalogs carried Grok from June
  • Procurement may already permit it
  • Decide the policy before a team discovers the listing

Automations July 16

Grok can run recurring tasks on its own, on a schedule or from an email trigger. Every run opens as a full conversation thread you can read afterward.

  • Scheduled automations for all users
  • Email triggers are SuperGrok-only
  • Every run leaves an inspectable thread

Automations, Routines and /goal are three different things Clarification

Three scheduling concepts. Three surfaces. Three owners, and three very different blast radii. Automations is the consumer feature for recurring tasks, on a schedule or an email trigger. The /goal command is the long-running execution mode inside the Grok Build CLI. Routines are the third. xAI introduced them in its September 3, 2026 post on designing Grok Bot, which describes them as giving a Bot a standing responsibility that runs on a schedule or in response to an event. A policy document that says only “scheduled tasks” now covers none of them properly.

  • Automations: recurring, consumer, scheduled or email-triggered
  • Routines: a standing responsibility held by a Grok Bot, scheduled or event-driven
  • The /goal command: sustained engineering execution in the CLI
  • Name the one you mean and don’t substitute one for another in a plan

Why this matters Strategic

Shipping into Excel, Outlook, Sheets, Slides and Docs puts Grok on the incumbents’ own ground, where Microsoft and Google ship their own assistants. Adoption can now happen with nobody making a purchasing decision.

  • Expect overlap with Copilot and Gemini entitlements
  • Set an add-in approval policy before demand arrives
  • Audit which connectors each add-in requests
7 / Business

Grok’s enterprise story now extends beyond X

Three of the six published plan tiers carry no price at all. And the only certification xAI publishes is SOC 2. Start there, because those are the two things a buyer asks first. Grok Business and Enterprise add company knowledge, administration and security, and since September 3, 2026 Grok Bot carries access, network and audit controls of its own. So the question is no longer just whether staff may use a consumer assistant, right? And since late August it’s no longer only a question about buying from xAI directly.

CapabilityBusinessEnterpriseVault (add-on to Enterprise)
Team management and billingIncludedIncludedIncluded
Google Drive groundingPermission-awarePermission-awarePermission-aware
SSO and SCIMNot includedIncludedIncluded
Advanced audit and securityStandard controlsAdvancedAdvanced
Dedicated data planeNot includedOptional add-onIncluded
Customer-managed keysNot includedOptional add-onIncluded
SOC 2 (Type I and II)Named on the pricing pageNamed on the pricing pageNamed on the pricing page

Published plan prices Three tiers unpriced

Six tiers on the pricing page, checked September 18, 2026. Only three show a figure: Free at $0 per month, SuperGrok at $30 per month and SuperGrok Plus at $100 per month. SuperGrok Heavy is a published plan column with a Get Heavy button and no price. Business shows no price and a Get Business button. Enterprise shows no price and routes to Contact. And the unpriced tiers don’t split neatly into consumer and business, because SuperGrok Heavy is a consumer tier with no price either. Read the page structure, not just the columns. The line about talking to sales for custom rate limits, dedicated infrastructure, SSO, compliance requirements and volume pricing doesn’t sit with Business. It lives in a separate “Need a custom plan?” section attached to Enterprise. Quote it as a Business route and you’ve misread the page.

  • Three unpriced tiers: SuperGrok Heavy, Business and Enterprise
  • The talk-to-sales line belongs to Enterprise, not Business
  • No per-seat Business price is published anywhere on the pricing page
  • Get any Business seat price from xAI in writing
  • Don’t reuse the SuperGrok $30 as a business rate

Company knowledge

Grok can search Google Drive while respecting the permissions already set there.

  • Citation previews
  • Highlighted relevant passages
  • No access to unshared files

Data commitment

xAI says business data isn’t used to train its models.

  • Still review product terms
  • Map regional data needs
  • Control connector access

Collections API

Agentic search across large document stores, for data rooms, legal review and financial modeling.

  • Curate the source set
  • Check retrieval coverage
  • Preserve citations

Enterprise controls

SSO, SCIM, administration and audit features for larger managed deployments.

  • Lifecycle users correctly
  • Assign product ownership
  • Monitor usage

Vault Add-on, not a tier

An isolated data plane with application-level encryption and customer-managed keys, aimed at the most sensitive customers. Write down what it isn’t. Vault isn’t one of the six plan tiers on the pricing page, which are Free, SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy, Business and Enterprise. Treat it, and the dedicated data plane and customer-managed keys beside it in the table above, as options layered on Enterprise. Not as another plan to buy.

  • Not one of the six published plan tiers
  • An option on top of Enterprise, priced through sales like Enterprise itself
  • Evaluate operational model, logging and recovery
  • Verify contractual scope in writing

Third-party safeguards evaluation September 1

A lab tested Grok 4.6 and got two numbers that pull against each other by design. LatchBio measured 59.2% refusal on adversarial tasks and 64.8% completion on legitimate ones. Those figures are LatchBio’s, published by xAI. It’s a safeguards check, not a product change. Refusing more bad requests and completing more good ones fight each other, so read the pair together and never one alone.

  • Source: “Biosecurity at the frontier,” xAI, September 1, 2026
  • Figures produced by LatchBio, published by xAI
  • A safeguards study, not a capability or product release
  • Useful evidence for a security review, not a compliance certificate

Skills and apps

Reusable work behavior and connected tools turn the product into a workflow layer for the organization.

  • Govern creation and sharing
  • Review third-party connectors
  • Retire stale skills

SOC 2 is the only certification xAI publishes Compliance

SOC 2, Type I and Type II, named on the pricing page across multiple tiers including Free. That’s the only certification xAI publishes first-party. It’s easy to miss, because a security questionnaire sends you to a trust or compliance page and xAI puts it on the pricing page instead. No ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP or GDPR claim appears there. The safety page separately links an xAI Frontier AI Framework dated June 30, 2026. That’s a policy document, not an attestation, so don’t hand it to a reviewer as one.

  • SOC 2 Type I and Type II, named on the pricing page
  • No ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP or GDPR claim published there
  • Ask for the report itself, not the badge
  • The pricing page is rewritten in place, so confirm directly

Three price levers that move the bill API commercials

The headline $2 and $6 isn’t the whole bill. Three switches sit behind it, and two of them push the number up. The docs price page lists a US regional endpoint at 1.1 times standard rates and Priority Processing at 2 times standard rates. The Batch API discount of 20 percent is the one that pulls down, and it doesn’t apply to the flagship. Model pages state region us-east-1 and point to full regional based pricing. So before you sign off a budget, find out which of the three a team has switched on.

  • US regional endpoint: 1.1x standard rates
  • Priority Processing: 2x standard rates
  • Batch API: 20 percent off, grok-4.3 and grok-4.20 variants only
  • Read from a docs page rewritten in place, so confirm directly

Grok Bot for Enterprise September 3

xAI says enterprises need to govern Bots at scale, and that this release adds the access, network and audit controls to do it. Its isolation claim has two halves. Each user’s work in Grok Bot runs in its own secure, isolated environment, separate from every other user. And a Bot has no access by default, reaching only the accounts you sign it into. xAI names Legora, Supermicro and ServiceTitan as customers and says thousands of organizations have adopted Grok Bot since launch. All of that is vendor statement, not audited finding. The post also offered free usage for two weeks from September 3. That expired on September 17, 2026, and no price is stated for the period after it.

  • Access, network and audit controls, as described by xAI
  • Isolation and adoption figures are vendor claims, not findings
  • The free-usage offer expired on September 17, 2026
  • A full security architecture document is linked from the post, and the isolation claim rests on it rather than on the post
  • Read that document before relying on the isolation claim

The procurement case study is xAI’s own Vendor self-report

xAI pointed Grok Bot at its own vendor spend, contracts and usage data, and then published what it found. More than $100,000 in direct savings. Read it the way you read the LatchBio figures, then one notch more carefully, because here there’s no third party at all. The vendor ran the study, on its own data, and published its own result. It’s a useful description of a workflow. It isn’t evidence of what the same agent would find in your company.

  • Source: xAI internal case study, September 4, 2026
  • Line items: $14,220 from 43 unused SaaS seats, $85,662 annually in unused SKUs, and an office supply order cut from $14,629 to $6,143
  • xAI’s own data, xAI’s own measurement, xAI’s own publication
  • No independent verification of any line item
  • Useful as a workflow template, not as a savings forecast
  • Any pilot should establish its own baseline before it starts
8 / Behavior Playbook

Nine habits for using Grok without confusing speed with truth

Grok pays off when a team keeps four things apart on purpose: live signal, verified evidence, blunt critique and bounded execution. And when nothing you ship leans on a moving alias, an undated absence claim, or a model that can walk off a price table without notice.

01

Use X for signal

Map the reaction and the language. Don’t call it representative truth.

02

Verify the factual core

Move every claim that matters to a primary record.

03

Time-stamp live answers

Say when the signal was observed, because it will change.

04

Ask for direct critique

Use Grok’s tone to stress-test an idea, then go back to the evidence.

05

Use /goal for outcomes

Give Build a finish line, tests and a boundary on what it may do.

06

Inspect external state

Look at the code, the file, the post or the media. Not the claim that it’s done.

07

Fetch before you say “no card exists”

An absence claim needs a direct fetch of the document. Not a glance at an index or a directory path. xAI makes the trap concrete: data.x.ai returns 404 on both of its index paths while the model card files beneath them resolve.

08

Name region, surface and date

API, consumer app, cloud catalog and geography are four separate claims, and they landed on four different days.

09

Pin the model ID

Never ride an alias. grok-voice-latest repriced itself on August 5, 2026 with no action by the customer, grok-imagine-image-quality silently drops to low quality on November 2, 2026, and grok-voice-think-fast-1.0 left the price table with no dated notice at all.

9 / Watch Outs

Fast social intelligence is noisy by construction

The things that make Grok good are the same things that make it risky. Live feeds can be gamed. A confident tone can hide uncertainty. And an integrated agent can act before a weak claim gets corrected. Two more risks sit on xAI’s own pages. An index path can return 404 while the files beneath it resolve, which makes an absence easy to assert and hard to prove. And xAI rewrites undated pages without notice, in both directions: a price can be quietly reconciled upward, and a model can vanish from the price table with no retirement date at all.

Selection bias

Visible X conversation isn’t the same thing as broad public, customer or employee sentiment.

Coordinated manipulation

Bots and campaigns can manufacture salience, repetition and the look of consensus.

Confident tone

Directness can make an uncertain reading feel settled. Ask for sources and calibration.

An xAI index can 404 while the files beneath it resolve

xAI links five model cards from x.ai/safety, including one for Grok 4.5 dated July 14, 2026 and hosted at media.x.ai. Three of the five are still served from data.x.ai, whose two index paths data.x.ai/ and data.x.ai/model-cards both return 404 while the files don’t. The Grok 4 Fast card was fetched from that host directly on September 18, 2026. So a check aimed at the index, or at the host, reports the cards as gone. Ask for the card by model number and fetch the file itself before you report it missing. Be as precise about the shape of an absence as about the absence.

Model cards are per model, and they sit on two hosts

Five cards exist. Grok 4.6 (August 12, 2026, revision 2026-08-17) and Grok 4.5 (July 14, 2026, revision 2026-07-20) are on media.x.ai. Grok 4 Fast, Grok Code Fast 1 and Grok 4 are on data.x.ai. All five are text models. There’s no card for Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0, for grok-build-0.1 or for any Imagine model, and none for anything newer than 4.6 because nothing newer than 4.6 exists. A card for the current model says nothing about the one you deployed in July. Match the card to the model ID your product actually calls.

An announced model with no ID to buy

x.ai/api carried grok-4.3 as flagship at $1.25/$2.50 as recently as early September. On September 18, 2026 it presents grok-4.6 at $2.00 input and $6.00 output per 1M, and grok-4.3 isn’t on it. xAI corrected that page with no notice and no date, so a figure copied from it a fortnight earlier is now quietly wrong. The live hazard runs the other way. The August 12 Grok 4.6 announcement says there’s a fast variant at twice the price, and no model ID with the word fast in it exists on any xAI pricing surface. Don’t budget for a model you can’t name. And if a vendor conversation quotes the fast-variant multiplier, ask for the ID.

Grok Business pricing is unconfirmed

The $30 per seat per month figure that circulates for Grok Business is UNCONFIRMED and is published nowhere. x.ai/pricing, checked September 18, 2026, shows SuperGrok at $30 per month and SuperGrok Plus at $100 per month. Business shows no per-seat price at all, only a Get Business button. The invitation to talk to sales sits in a “Need a custom plan?” section attached to Enterprise, not to Business. The $30 is the SuperGrok consumer price, and that’s how it travels. Don’t quote a Business seat price. Get it from xAI sales in writing.

A silent quality downgrade has a date

On November 2, 2026 grok-imagine-image-quality retires and its requests get served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality and a lower price. No error. No outage. Cheaper invoice, worse images. Put a visual check and a decision in the calendar before the date, because nothing will alert you on the day.

Voice alias reroute, executed

On August 5, 2026 grok-voice-latest began serving grok-voice-think-fast-2.0. That’s 60 percent more per minute of audio, $0.05 to $0.08, with nobody on your side doing anything. The warning was published a week ahead and it landed on the day, which is the argument for keeping a watchlist. The price table now names the 2.0 model inline on the speech-to-speech row, so the current model is documented even though the alias target itself is still not restated on any page.

A model can leave a page with no notice at all

Between September 3 and September 18, 2026 grok-voice-think-fast-1.0 went from [Deprecated] at $0.05 per minute of audio to simply absent. No row on the price table. No deprecation marking. No retirement date. No dated article. A dated deprecation is something you can diarize, raise a change request against and argue about with a vendor. A silent removal is none of those. It looks tidier on the page and it’s strictly worse for you. Treat any model that disappears from a vendor price table as a migration you’ve already started, whether or not it still answers when you call it.

The news index has been observed incomplete, and behaved this time

The x.ai/news index has previously served a current window while leaving out real articles that exist at their own URLs, including xai-joins-spacex and anthropic-compute-partnership. That didn’t happen on September 18, 2026. The index returned all 81 entries, both of those included, so the omission belongs in the past tense and the index may well be fixed. Keep the discipline anyway, because one clean read doesn’t undo a prior observation. Never enumerate xAI releases from the index. Link the dated article.

A first-party page is serving an Enterprise figure that isn’t a price

On September 18, 2026 x.ai/enterprise carries a heading reading For Enterprise, a section headed About the Enterprise Plan, and a figure rendered as $59 per user per month. Meanwhile x.ai/pricing publishes no Enterprise price at all and routes to Contact. A buyer will find that figure on a live x.ai path, and it must not be quoted as a Grok Enterprise price. The same page shows placeholder values throughout. It claims your company could save 0 hours a month per person, $0 in savings and 0 percent return. And its feature copy talks about calendars, Slack and scheduling assistants rather than about Grok. It reads as template or staging content served on a live x.ai path. If a vendor conversation or an internal business case cites the figure, ask for the number in writing on paper that xAI will stand behind.

Beta language is sticky

Grok Bot went from three plans to eight on August 26, 2026, gained an X integration on August 29 and gained enterprise access, network and audit controls on September 3. None of those posts uses the word beta. None says it left beta either. The September 3 release and the claim that thousands of organizations have adopted it are strong circumstantial evidence of general availability, which makes the temptation stronger and the discipline worth more. Widen the availability claim to the named plans. Stop short of calling it generally available, because xAI hasn’t.

Regional and tier availability, and why the EU isn’t settled

Grok 4.5 launched without EU access and gained it on July 17, 2026 on xAI’s own API console. That single date is the most misread fact about Grok in Europe. Availability varies by surface. GitHub Copilot, Amazon Bedrock, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Microsoft Foundry and Databricks each carry their own regions and terms, and Copilot access may need enabling in Copilot settings on business and enterprise tenants. One surface is shut to European users outright. Grok reached Word, Excel and PowerPoint through the Microsoft Frontier Program on September 12, 2026, behind an admin setting disabled by default. Frontier customers in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and the United Kingdom are excluded during the preview, with no end date given. That’s recorded in the sibling Microsoft 365 Copilot guide in this series. xAI model pages state region us-east-1 and reference regional pricing. Check the current status per surface, per model and per tier. Not a remembered one.

Third-party evaluation isn’t certification, and self-reporting isn’t evaluation

The LatchBio evaluation xAI published on September 1, 2026 reports 59.2% refusal on adversarial tasks and 64.8% completion on legitimate ones for Grok 4.6. Those are LatchBio’s measurements on task sets somebody chose, published by the vendor whose model was tested. The September 4, 2026 procurement case study is another step away from independence: xAI ran Grok Bot against its own vendor spend and published its own savings figures. Cite both with their attributions. Present neither as an approval or a forecast.

Agent permissions

Build plugins, external integrations and business apps widen the blast radius of a mistake, and Grok Build has been on web and mobile since August 19, 2026.

Voice and likeness

Custom voices and generated speech need explicit consent, impersonation controls and secure handling of the assets.

Integrated media errors

Video, physics, speech and audio can each fail on their own inside one polished clip. And changed defaults, like the August 28 move from medium to auto quality, shift the output without you doing anything.

Agent memory is now a security scope

Since September 16, 2026 Grok Build writes what xAI calls conventions, decisions and project facts to markdown files that live across sessions, per project workspace and globally. xAI says task state, temporary conclusions and secrets are deliberately left out. Take that as design intent, not as an assurance you’ve tested. An agent that carries notes between sessions hands you three new things. A new place for sensitive detail to land. A new artifact that travels with a repository. And a new thing to review when somebody leaves the team. Read the stored files with /memory, and decide who is allowed to.

Three cutoffs for one model

Grok 4.6’s knowledge cutoff reads February 1, 2026 on the docs model reference. The model card says pretraining to January 2026, with supplemental data as late as June 2026. The dedicated 4.6 model page says nothing at all. February 1 is the only one written as a plain date, which is exactly why it gets quoted as settled. Name the surface whenever you state a cutoff. And never let a recency assumption ride on a number three first-party pages disagree about.

The canonical retirement list couldn’t be opened

The xAI models page points to a Model Retirement guide dated May 15, 2026. On September 18, 2026 docs.x.ai/developers/deprecations, docs.x.ai/developers/migration and docs.x.ai/developers/model-retirement each returned 404, and the real URL couldn’t be found. The only dated retirement you can confirm first-party is grok-imagine-image-quality on November 2, 2026, from the September 2 release notes. Nothing else appears to have been retired or rerouted between September 3 and September 18. Treat that as unchecked rather than clear, because the list that would settle it couldn’t be read.

Rapid product churn

The release cadence is why dated claims and direct source links aren’t optional here.

10 / Sources

First-party evidence behind this guide

Every entry below links to a specific dated announcement, never to the rolling news index. There’s a reason for that. The index was once seen serving a current window while leaving out real articles that live at their own URLs, including xai-joins-spacex and anthropic-compute-partnership. On September 18, 2026 it returned all 81 entries, both of those included. So record that omission as a dated past observation rather than a current defect, and keep linking the dated article anyway. Two entries below show why you should never reverse-engineer a URL from a headline. x.ai/news/biosafety-at-the-frontier serves a post titled “Biosecurity at the frontier.” x.ai/news/grok-4-6-vertex-ai serves “Grok 4.6 on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.” Each slug below is the one that actually resolves. Now the harder part. A lot of what you’ve just read rests on xAI pages that get rewritten in place, so they can’t appear in the list below at all. Those pages are docs.x.ai/developers/pricing, docs.x.ai/developers/models and the per-model pages beneath it, docs.x.ai/developers/release-notes, x.ai/pricing, x.ai/voice, x.ai/api, x.ai/safety and x.ai/enterprise. Every claim in the following list comes from one of them, and anyone who needs to rely on one should confirm it directly. All API, voice and Imagine prices and context windows, including the grok-build-0.1 figures, the US regional endpoint at 1.1x, Priority Processing at 2x and the Batch API 20 percent discount. The disappearance of grok-voice-think-fast-1.0 from the price table, and the absence of any fast variant of grok-4.6 from it. Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0, its opt-in default and its empty pricing section. The February 1, 2026 cutoff on the docs model reference, and the absence of any cutoff on the dedicated 4.6 page. The July 8, 2026 API availability of Grok 4.5 and the July 17 EU access in the API console. The August 28 Imagine image API parameter changes, and the September 2 notice retiring grok-imagine-image-quality on November 2, 2026. All plan prices, the unpriced SuperGrok Heavy, Business and Enterprise tiers, the Get Heavy, Get Business and Contact calls to action, the “Need a custom plan?” section and the SOC 2 claim. The corrected $0.08 per minute rate now on x.ai/voice, and the corrected grok-4.6 flagship pricing now on x.ai/api. The five model cards linked from x.ai/safety. And the $59 per user per month figure currently served on x.ai/enterprise, which is recorded as an observation and never as a price. All five model cards are listed below, and they sit on two hosts. Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.5 are on media.x.ai. Grok 4 Fast, Grok Code Fast 1 and Grok 4 are served from data.x.ai, whose two index paths data.x.ai/ and data.x.ai/model-cards return 404 while the files themselves resolve. Those 404s read easily as a dead host. It isn’t dead: the Grok 4 Fast card was fetched directly from it to prove that, and the meta line of every card below says whether it was fetched or only linked. One more caveat, and it belongs in the open rather than buried here. No page states in so many words what the grok-voice-latest alias resolves to, so that reroute rests on the July 29 announcement plus the model name now printed inline on the price table. Finally, one set of claims rests on no xAI evidence at all and has no entry below. There are three of them. Grok arriving in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint through the Microsoft Frontier Program on September 12, 2026. The dedicated administrative setting that’s disabled by default. And the exclusion of Frontier customers in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and the United Kingdom during the preview. All three are attributed inline to the sibling Microsoft 365 Copilot guide in this published set. That guide records the Microsoft post “Expanding model choice in Copilot with Grok” by xiasong, published September 12, 2026 and updated September 14. xAI has published no dated article on it, so nothing about it’s cited below, and a reader relying on it should confirm it against Microsoft’s own post.

Model Card: Grok 4.6SpaceXAI · Model Card: Grok 4.6, August 12, 2026, revision 2026-08-17 · header re-verified September 18, 2026Model Card: Grok 4.5SpaceXAI · Model Card: Grok 4.5, July 14, 2026, revision 2026-07-20 · linked from the safety page and fetched directly on September 3, 2026Model Card: Grok 4 FastSpaceXAI · Model Card: Grok 4 Fast, September 19, 2025 · fetched directly on September 18, 2026: the file resolves and is headed “Grok 4 Fast Model Card”Model Card: Grok Code Fast 1SpaceXAI · Model Card: Grok Code Fast 1, August 26, 2025 · linked from the safety page and not fetched directlyModel Card: Grok 4SpaceXAI · Model Card: Grok 4, August 20, 2025 · linked from the safety page and not fetched directlyxAI Frontier AI FrameworkSpaceXAI · June 30, 2026 · the safety policy document linked from the safety page; a framework, not an attestationMemory in Grok BuildSpaceXAI · September 16, 2026 · persistent project memory written to markdown across sessionsSetting Grok Bot loose on procurementSpaceXAI · September 4, 2026 · xAI’s own internal case study on its own spend data: vendor self-reporting, not evidenceGrok Bot for EnterpriseSpaceXAI · September 3, 2026 · access, network and audit controls; the free-usage offer expired September 17, 2026Designing Grok Bot for a world of persistent agentsSpaceXAI · September 3, 2026 · the five Grok Bot primitives and the introduction of RoutinesBiosecurity at the frontierSpaceXAI · September 1, 2026 · LatchBio third-party safeguards evaluation of Grok 4.6Grok Bot now works with XSpaceXAI · August 29, 2026 · first version of the X integrationGrok Bot is now included with more plansSpaceXAI · August 26, 2026 · expansion from three plans to eightGrok 4.6 on Microsoft FoundrySpaceXAI · August 26, 2026 · Grok 4.6 in Microsoft’s model catalogGrok 4.6 on Gemini Enterprise Agent PlatformSpaceXAI · August 21, 2026 · Grok 4.6 in Google’s model catalogGrok 4.6 on Amazon BedrockSpaceXAI · August 19, 2026 · a dated article at its own URL, not a release noteGrok Build on web and mobileSpaceXAI · August 19, 2026 · also a dated article, not a release noteGrok 4.6 in GitHub CopilotSpaceXAI · August 14, 2026 · the first third-party surface for Grok 4.6, five days before BedrockCursor is now a part of SpaceXCursor · August 14, 2026 · acquired by SpaceX, completing a process begun in April · no terms disclosedGrok 4.6SpaceXAI · August 12, 2026 · the flagship announcement, including the fast variant said to cost twice the priceImagine Image 2.0SpaceXAI · August 7, 2026 · the dated article behind the image version changeImagine Video 1.5 with ReferencesSpaceXAI · July 31, 2026 · reference-guided video generationGrok Voice Think Fast 2.0SpaceXAI · July 29, 2026 · $0.08 per minute of audio, and the August 5 grok-voice-latest rerouteIntroducing Build ModeSpaceXAI · July 28, 2026 · a dated Build release published outside the release notesGrok 4.5 in GitHub CopilotSpaceXAI · July 28, 2026 · the prior generation in Copilot, just over two weeks before 4.6Introducing Grok in Google WorkspaceSpaceXAI · July 24, 2026 · free add-on for Sheets, Slides and DocsWorkflows in Grok BuildSpaceXAI · July 23, 2026 · packaged repeatable work inside BuildGrok 4.5 EverywhereSpaceXAI · July 22, 2026 · rollout to iOS, Android, web and XIntroducing Grok for OutlookSpaceXAI · July 21, 2026 · summarization, drafting and triageIntroducing Grok for ExcelSpaceXAI · July 20, 2026 · free Microsoft 365 add-inIntroducing Grok 4.5SpaceXAI · post byline July 16, 2026 · the prior generation: model, pricing and Cursor trainingAutomations in GrokSpaceXAI · July 16, 2026 · scheduled and email-triggered runsGrok Build is now open sourceSpaceXAI · July 15, 2026 · agent loop, tools, TUI and extension systems21 New Flagship Grok VoicesSpaceXAI · July 6, 2026 · the voice library behind the speech productsIntroducing the Voice Agent BuilderSpaceXAI · July 1, 2026 · still marked Beta, not GAIntroducing /goalSpaceXAI · June 22, 2026 · long-running task delegationGrok on DatabricksSpaceXAI · June 18, 2026 · the fifth third-party catalog, and it predates the August waveGrok for WordSpaceXAI · June 18, 2026 · the second add-in, a month before the July releasesGrok on Amazon BedrockSpaceXAI · June 17, 2026 · the original Bedrock listing; only Grok 4.6 on Bedrock was new in AugustGrok Imagine Video 1.5SpaceXAI · June 16, 2026Grok for PowerPointSpaceXAI · June 16, 2026 · the first add-in, which is where the program actually beginsIntroducing Grok BuildSpaceXAI · May 25, 2026 · the coding CLI agentGrok Build 0.1 on APISpaceXAI · Build on the API surface · the model ID is grok-build-0.1xAI joins SpaceXSpaceXAI · February 2, 2026 · why site metadata now reads SpaceXAI · the last corporate item on the xAI news indexIntroducing Grok Business and Grok EnterpriseSpaceXAI · December 30, 2025 · no per-seat price is published; pricing must come from sales

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