Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI, has officially launched API access for Grok 3, the company’s most advanced artificial intelligence model to date. Despite Musk being entangled in a legal battle with OpenAI, xAI continues to move forward aggressively, positioning Grok 3 as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.5.

Unveiled months ago, Grok 3 has been powering features on X (formerly Twitter), which xAI acquired earlier this year. Designed with multimodal capabilities, Grok 3 can analyze both text and images, respond intelligently to user queries, and provide in-depth reasoning. With the introduction of its API, xAI is making this powerful model accessible to developers and businesses around the world.

Two Variants: Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini

xAI’s API now offers two versions of the model: Grok 3 and a lighter, more affordable Grok 3 Mini. Both are equipped with advanced reasoning abilities, although they differ significantly in pricing and performance.

• Grok 3 Pricing:
  • $3 per million input tokens (~750,000 words)
  • $15 per million output tokens
• Grok 3 Mini Pricing:
  • $0.30 per million input tokens
  • $0.50 per million output tokens

For users seeking faster performance, xAI also provides a speed-optimized version of each model:

• Grok 3 Speed Variant:
  • $5 per million input tokens
  • $25 per million output tokens
• Grok 3 Mini Speed Variant:
  • $0.60 per million input tokens
  • $4 per million output tokens

Competitive Landscape and Benchmark Controversies

While the Grok 3 pricing is aligned with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — another model boasting reasoning capabilities — it is notably more expensive than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which outperforms Grok 3 in many popular AI benchmark tests. Some users and experts have even criticized xAI for releasing allegedly misleading benchmark results, raising questions about transparency.

Additionally, there are concerns about the model’s context window — the amount of data Grok 3 can process at once. Although xAI initially claimed support for a 1 million-token window, the API currently maxes out at 131,072 tokens, or about 97,500 words. This discrepancy has prompted skepticism among developers and AI researchers using the platform.

Grok 3’s Evolution: From Edgy Replies to Political Neutrality

When Grok was first introduced by Elon Musk two years ago, it was marketed as an AI that was bold, unfiltered, and unafraid to tackle controversial topics. Unlike traditional models like ChatGPT, Grok and its successors were willing to use humor, sarcasm, and even profanity when prompted.

However, earlier versions of Grok were criticized for leaning politically left on topics such as transgender rights and social inequality. Musk attributed this bias to the model’s training data, which was largely sourced from public web content. In response, he pledged to “shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”

Whether Grok 3 successfully delivers on that promise remains unclear. While some offensive or biased content has reportedly been reduced, the model has not been free from controversy. Notable instances include brief censorship of negative remarks about Donald Trump and Musk himself.

Final Thoughts

With the release of API access, Grok 3 is now more accessible to developers and organizations looking to harness its AI capabilities. Although its pricing is higher than some competitors and its technical specs have raised eyebrows, Grok 3 reflects xAI’s ambitions to offer an alternative to mainstream AI tools dominated by OpenAI and Google.

As xAI continues to evolve, all eyes are on how Grok 3 will perform in real-world applications — and whether it can truly live up to its promise of being both powerful and politically balanced.