xAI

• xAI, Grok models with an OpenAI-shaped API and live X data access.
• - Grok family via an OpenAI-shaped API, so porting is close to a base-URL change
• Differentiators: real-time access to X/Twitter content and aggressive fast-tier pricing
• Thinner enterprise story: less published governance, fewer regions, shorter deprecation track record.
• Founded 2023.
• Late-stage private.

• We track it in 1 comparison, LLM APIs.
• Every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression.
• Across those rosters it sits against 17 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it gives ground.

• API since, 2024, 16th of 18. OpenAI records 2020.

• None of these disqualify it on their own.
• They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

• Provenance. 20 of 27 tracked fields carry a value for xAI, and 9 of those cite a document you can open.
• Last verified 2026-07-30.
• Every figure keeps its own provenance, measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported, and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

• Its nearest neighbour in our data is Qwen.
• xAI is ahead on Schema output (Yes against Partial) and Image input (Yes against Partial).
• Qwen takes MCP support (Partial against No) and Context window (1,000,000 tokens against 500,000 tokens).
• That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster, see xAI alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Founded

2023

Funding

Late-stage private

Fields we track

20 of 27

Last verified

2026-07-30

Easy to try and strong on price-performance, but the thinnest governance here, so fine for consumer, hard for regulated work.

$/M output

$6/M tok4th of 9

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-30source

$/M input

$2/M tok4th of 9

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-30source

API since

202416th of 18

Inferred

Tool use

●Yes1st of 18

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-30source

$/M cache read

$0.3/M tok5th of 8

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-30source

Schema output

●Yes1st of 18

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Pinnable versions

●Yes1st of 18

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

OpenAI-compat API

●Yes1st of 18

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-30source

xAI is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record.

• Products that want real-time X/Twitter context in the model.
• Cheap evaluation of a frontier alternative with a one-line base-URL change.
• Consumer applications where governance requirements are light.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

• API since. xAI records 2024, 16th of 18 in the LLM APIs roster. OpenAI records 2020 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

• We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing.
• Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know.

• 7 of the 27 fields we track for xAI are still blank: Max output, TTFT p50, Output tok/s, Batch discount, Cache TTL, Notice period and Zero retention.
• Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest.
• If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.