xAI Launches API for Grok 3 Amid Legal Tensions with OpenAI

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is forging ahead with its product roadmap despite being countersued by OpenAI. The company has officially launched an API for its Grok 3 model, opening up commercial access to its most powerful AI system yet.

The Grok 3 release brings xAI’s multimodal, “edgy” AI to developers — offering reasoning capabilities, image analysis, and more, via two versions: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini.

API Pricing & Performance

Grok 3’s API comes with a premium price tag:

• Standard Grok 3:

  • $3 per million input tokens (~750,000 words)

  • $15 per million output tokens

• Standard Grok 3 Mini:

  • $0.30 per million input tokens

  • $0.50 per million output tokens

• Speedier versions:

  • Grok 3: $5 input / $25 output per million tokens

  • Grok 3 Mini: $0.60 input / $4 output per million tokens

This pricing puts xAI in direct competition with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, but at a premium over Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which generally outperforms Grok 3 in major AI benchmarks.

Context Window Controversy

While xAI previously claimed Grok 3 could handle 1 million tokens, the API currently supports a maximum context window of 131,072 tokens (~97,500 words). This discrepancy has drawn criticism from developers, some of whom called the earlier benchmarks “misleading.”

Edgy Branding vs. Real-World Behavior

Musk originally marketed Grok as “unfiltered,” “anti-woke,” and willing to engage with controversial or politically charged questions that other AIs might avoid. Early versions of Grok were notably more willing to use vulgar language and defy mainstream moderation policies.

Yet, research found that Grok models leaned left on issues like transgender rights and diversity — a contradiction Musk attributed to the publicly available training data. He has since vowed to steer Grok toward political neutrality, though it remains unclear whether Grok 3 reflects that shift.

From Social Network to AI Platform

xAI’s Grok models are integrated directly into X, Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter — which xAI acquired earlier this year. This marks a full-circle moment, where Musk’s AI ambitions, media influence, and product distribution converge into one vertical stack.

The API launch is a pivotal step for xAI as it seeks to build developer trust and compete with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, even as legal battles and performance scrutiny mount. Whether Grok 3 will carve out a distinct identity — or be dismissed as a political gimmick — remains to be seen.