Is Grok Down?

PRODUCT PAIR (2026-07-15/16, vendor posts on x.ai/news): (1) **Grok Automations** (7/16) -- scheduled and autonomous recurring tasks in the Grok app (standing queries, monitoring, repeat jobs), SpaceXAI's answer to ChatGPT's Scheduled Tasks. (2) **Grok Build open-sourced** (7/15) -- the terminal coding agent's source is now public, relevant if you want to audit or extend the harness. Roadmap noise, clearly labeled: Musk indicated a **Grok 4.6** is in the pipeline (~7/17-18, no date, no specs -- aggregator-grade until a vendor post exists) and Grok 5's timeline has slid repeatedly. EU AVAILABILITY STILL UNRESOLVED: the 'mid-July' EU promise for Grok 4.5 has conflicting reports (one aggregator claims EU access landed ~7/16; another says still unavailable) and x.ai's Grok 4.5 page wouldn't load for verification -- we are NOT flipping EU availability until vendor wording confirms; re-check next sweep

GROK 4.5 LAUNCHED (2026-07-08 developer surfaces, public rollout reported 7/9): SpaceXAI shipped **Grok 4.5, 'our smartest model built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work'** -- a mixture-of-experts frontier model **trained jointly with Cursor** (SpaceX closed its Anysphere/Cursor acquisition in June) on trillions of tokens of Cursor data. Musk's framing: 'Opus-class, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost.' **API pricing: $2/M input + $6/M output** (a faster variant at $4/$18 is offered through Cursor). Day-one availability: **Grok Build, the SpaceXAI console/API, and Cursor on all plans**; press reports public access via grok.com and the X app from 7/9; **NOT available in the EU at launch**. Vendor-reported benchmarks (charts, third-party verification pending): **Terminal-Bench 2.1 83.3%, SWE-Bench Pro 64.7%, #1 on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark**, with standout token efficiency (~16K output tokens per SWE-Bench Pro task vs ~67K for Opus 4.8 max per launch charts); Artificial Analysis measured 91.3 tok/s on the API. CONSUMER ACCESS CONFIRMED (7/10 press): available to **X Premium and SuperGrok subscribers** in the Grok interface, and it's the **default model in Grok Build** (beta, SuperGrok + X Premium+). API also live on OpenRouter, Vercel, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Databricks. **INDEPENDENT BENCHMARKS PUBLISHED (Artificial Analysis, 7/9-10): Intelligence Index 54** -- AA's launch article places it 4th among frontier models behind Fable 5, GPT-5.5, and Opus 4.8 (the model page ranks it #8 of 188 counting all model variants); **GDPval-AA v2 Elo 1543**; 92.9 output tok/s measured; 500K context window per AA. AA calls the 16-point gen-over-gen jump xAI's largest ever. Press caveat: reviewers note a higher hallucination rate than frontier peers. Aggregator claims of a '1.5T-param V9 foundation' remain UNVERIFIED -- treat as rumor

GROK BUILD PLUGIN MARKETPLACE (2026-06-11, vendor-primary): xAI launched a built-in **plugin marketplace for Grok Build** -- plugins bundle skills, slash commands, agents, hooks, MCP servers, and LSPs; installs are commit-SHA-pinned for supply-chain safety; the catalog is open to community submissions via PR. Launch partners: MongoDB, Vercel, Sentry, Chrome DevTools, Cloudflare. Mirrors the plugin/extension pattern Claude Code and Gemini-CLI-era tooling established -- Grok Build is maturing fast for a product still labeled beta

JUNE CLUSTER (2026-06, all vendor-primary on x.ai/news): **Grok Imagine 1.5 Preview** (6/3) -- image-to-video generation up to 720p, available as an API preview. **Composer 2.5** (6/1) -- xAI's 'fast, SOTA model for long-running tasks,' now selectable in the Grok Build /models menu for SuperGrok and X Premium+ subscribers (NOT related to Cursor's Composer line despite the name). **Grok Build 0.1 on the API** (5/29) -- the coding-agent model behind Grok Build became directly callable via the xAI API: 256K context, always-on reasoning, text + image input. Grok Build itself ('Introducing Grok Build,' 5/25) is in early beta for ALL SuperGrok and X Premium+ subscribers -- broader than the original Heavy-tier-only gate. Also: Grok voice now powers Vapi (6/3) and Gopuff's 'Go' shopping agent (6/9). NOTE: 'Grok 5' / 'V9-Medium mid-June' claims remain aggregator-only with zero vendor signal -- not real until x.ai posts it

PRODUCT (2026-05-18): xAI shipped **Grok Skills** -- a persistent-memory Skills layer on Grok 4.3. Skills are user-defined named capabilities Grok carries across sessions on web / iOS / Android (recipe collection, code-review checklist, study-habits coach, etc.). Each Skill is a stored prompt + behavioral pattern Grok consults when invoked by name. Per-user storage; not shared across accounts. Differentiates Grok from ChatGPT Memory (passive recall) toward configurable named tools. Pairs with the 5/14 Grok Build CLI ship -- Skills are the consumer-facing persistent-state layer, Build CLI is the developer-facing one. Material in the 'agent goes where you go' competitive narrative alongside Codex on mobile (5/14) + Cursor Jira integration (5/19) + Devin Windows VMs (5/21).

MODEL LINEUP CONSOLIDATION (2026-05-15, went live 12:00 PT): xAI auto-redirected **8 deprecated model slugs** to grok-4.3 (or grok-imagine-image-quality for the image model). Affected slugs: grok-4-1-fast-reasoning, grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning, grok-4-fast-reasoning, grok-4-fast-non-reasoning, grok-4-0709, grok-code-fast-1, grok-3, grok-imagine-image-pro. All requests now silently bill at grok-4.3 rates ($1.25 input / $2.50 output per 1M tokens). Anyone with these slugs pinned in production or referenced inside a Copilot/Cursor/Codex multi-model selector now pays the new rate without any code change. Migration path: explicitly switch to grok-4.3 in your model selector and audit token-spend after 5/15 since the new rate may differ from what each deprecated slug was previously billed at. The grok-code-fast-1 slug retirement is the same event that took the model off GitHub Copilot's Chat/inline/agent surfaces on 5/15