Elon Musk’s xAI has made Grok 4 available on its free tiers as it seeks to take advantage of initial user dissatisfaction with OpenAI’s new GPT-5. The company has positioned Grok as freewheeling and uncensored, a contrast to GPT-5, which has been criticized on Reddit and other social platforms as a “corporate beige zombie” with too many guardrails. After its February debut, Grok 3 was reined-in with checks including removal of its native image generator in March. Grok 4 was released in July with integrated image and video features as well as a “Spicy” mode for creating risqué content.

Although initially introduced only on paid tiers on xAI and X social, “Grok 4 is now free for all users worldwide,” although there are apparently some unspecified usage caps. An X social post by xAI instructs users to “simply use Auto mode and Grok will route complex queries to Grok 4” or always use Grok 4 by selecting the “Expert” setting.

“By the numbers, Grok 4 is competitive with, and in some cases surpasses, rival models such as OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic Claude 3.5 in reasoning benchmarks and speed, but until now, it needed a paid subscription to access,” SiliconANGLE reports.

Along with Grok 4’s free availability, xAI has also made Grok Imagine, its built-in multimodal tool, which includes image-to-video generation, “free for all users in the U.S. for a limited time,” SiliconANGLE notes. “Grok Imagine competes with OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 and is available on iOS and Android platforms.”

Tom’s Guide calls the various AI benchmarks that model-makers use to tout the superiority of their wares as “a world of small margins,” noting that in 2025 “Google’s Gemini dominated most of these tests, then xAI’s Grok stepped in with an update to match Gemini.”

Tom’s reviews a number of tests, including Vellum, LMArena and Artificial Analysis, pointing out that while OpenAI used internal tests to support the release of GPT-5, it has now been subject to independent review, achieving top marks.

GPT-5 “scrapes past Grok 4 in the benchmark for model intelligence, scoring 69 (Grok 4 scored 68),” but “came second behind Grok 4 in coding ability (but only by 0.1 percent),” Tom’s reports.

Now users find out for themselves. “For a limited time, we are rolling out generous usage limits so you can explore Grok 4’s full potential,” the xAI post explains.

Related:
New Tests Show ChatGPT-5 Is More Accurate Than GPT-4o, TechRadar, 8/12/25
ChatGPT vs. Grok vs. Gemini: Which AI Chatbot Should You Use in 2025?, Mashable, 8/6/25
Why xAI Is Giving You ‘Limited’ Free Access to Grok 4, ZDNet, 8/11/25