xAI Launches Grok 4 AI Model with $300 Monthly Subscription
It makes xAI’s subscription plan the most expensive among the major AI players.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, just dropped its most ambitious model yet, Grok 4, right in the middle of a PR firestorm. And while the model flexes frontier-level performance on paper, the rollout is raising just as many eyebrows for its price tag as it is for its capabilities.
On Wednesday, Musk revealed Grok 4 and its premium sibling, Grok 4 Heavy, calling the latter a “multi-agent” system, essentially an AI study group where multiple agents solve a problem and compare answers. It’s meant to mimic higher-order reasoning. But here’s the kicker: if you want early access to this “study group,” it’ll cost you a steep $300 per month under a new SuperGrok Heavy subscription.
That makes xAI’s subscription plan the most expensive among the major AI players. In contrast, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro plan costs $200/month, and Anthropic’s Claude Max plan is around $100 to $200 monthly per person depending on preferred usage. Google offers a Gemini AI Ultra plan for individual users, priced at $249.99 per month in the U.S. Perplexity's also recently launched its $200 per month Max plan. The Pro plans from these companies are typically designed for power users and come with volume pricing, API credits, or integrations.
So what are you paying for with Grok?
Performance-wise, Grok 4 lands some solid punches. It scored 25.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam without tools, ahead of Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3 model. Its Heavy variant scored 44.4% with tools, a major jump over Gemini’s 26.9%. Grok also set a record on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark with 15.9%-16.2%, nearly doubling Claude Opus 4.
But it’s not all clean wins. Just days before launch, Grok’s automated X account posted antisemitic content, forcing xAI to limit its activity and erase parts of its system prompt that encouraged “politically incorrect” answers. At the same time, Linda Yaccarino stepped down as X's CEO, leaving a messy leadership void.
Musk avoided addressing the scandal during the livestream, focusing instead on Grok’s academic prowess and future roadmap, including an AI coding model (August), a multimodal agent (September), and a video generation tool (October).
Still, the steep $300 price could limit traction. Developers and startups may hesitate to adopt Grok when rival models, already integrated into major ecosystems, offer competitive performance at a tenth of the cost. Without enterprise-level support or clear guardrails to prevent future PR disasters, Grok might struggle to move beyond Musk’s most loyal followers.
Kelechi Edeh
