Musk's xAI Debuts Grok 4 with New $300 Monthly Subscription

xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, introduced its new flagship model, Grok 4, on Wednesday evening. The company also announced SuperGrok Heavy, a premium AI subscription priced at $300 per month.

Grok is xAI's competitor to AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, capable of analyzing images and answering user questions. The model has become more integrated into Musk's social media platform X, which xAI recently acquired. However, this integration has also highlighted some of Grok's problematic behavior to a wider audience.

Introducing Grok 4, the world's most powerful AI model. Watch the livestream now: https://t.co/59iDX5s2ck

— xAI (@xai) July 10, 2025

xAI has set high expectations for Grok 4. The new model will compete directly with OpenAI's upcoming GPT-5, scheduled for release later this summer.

"Grok 4 outperforms PhD-level expertise in every academic discipline without exception," Musk stated during Wednesday's livestream. "While it occasionally lacks common sense and hasn't yet pioneered new technologies or scientific discoveries, we believe these advancements are inevitable."

The Grok 4 debut comes during a turbulent period for Musk's business ventures. Earlier on Wednesday, Linda Yaccarino concluded her two-year tenure as CEO of X. The company has not yet named a replacement.

Yaccarino's exit follows an incident where Grok's automated X account responded to users with antisemitic content, including remarks about Hollywood's "Jewish executives" and positive references to Hitler. xAI temporarily restricted Grok's account and removed the offensive posts. In response, the company appears to have removed a recently added directive from Grok's system instructions that encouraged the AI to make "politically incorrect" statements.

During the presentation, Musk and xAI executives focused primarily on Grok 4's technical capabilities rather than addressing the recent controversy.

Save up to $475 on TechCrunch All Stage passes

Accelerate innovation. Scale efficiently. Forge deeper connections. Join industry pioneers from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and other leading firms for a comprehensive day of strategic workshops and networking opportunities.

Save $450 on TechCrunch All Stage passes

Accelerate innovation. Scale efficiently. Forge deeper connections. Join industry pioneers from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and other leading firms for a comprehensive day of strategic workshops and networking opportunities.

xAI released two versions on Wednesday: the standard Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, described as a "multi-agent system" with enhanced capabilities. According to Musk, Grok 4 Heavy coordinates multiple specialized agents that work concurrently on problems, then collaboratively evaluate solutions "similar to an academic study group" to determine optimal answers.

xAI reports that Grok 4 delivers cutting-edge results across multiple benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam – a rigorous assessment featuring thousands of crowd-sourced questions spanning mathematics, humanities, and natural sciences. Without external tools, Grok 4 achieved a score of 25.4%, surpassing Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (21.6%) and OpenAI's o3-high (21%).

When equipped with specialized tools, Grok 4 Heavy reportedly scored 44.4%, significantly outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro with tools, which reached 26.9%.

The nonprofit Arc Prize confirmed that Grok established a new state-of-the-art record on its ARC-AGI-2 evaluation – a challenging visual pattern recognition assessment. Grok's score of 16.2% nearly doubles the performance of its closest competitor, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.

Alongside the new models, xAI introduced SuperGrok Heavy, its most expensive subscription tier at $300 monthly. Subscribers gain early access to Grok 4 Heavy and priority feature releases. While similar to premium offerings from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, xAI now provides the highest-priced subscription among leading AI providers.

SuperGrok Heavy subscribers will receive preview access to upcoming xAI products. The company announced an AI coding model for August release, a multimodal agent for September, and a video generation system for October.

xAI is making Grok 4 available through its API to encourage developer adoption. Although xAI's enterprise division launched just two months ago, the company plans to collaborate with cloud infrastructure providers to distribute Grok through their platforms.

Despite Grok's impressive benchmark performance, xAI faces challenges in overcoming recent controversies as it positions Grok as a viable alternative to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for business applications. Whether organizations will embrace Grok despite its documented limitations remains uncertain.