xAI to Retire Older Grok Models, Recommends Migration to Grok 4.3 with Enhanced Capabilities
xAI sunsets six Grok models; Grok 4.3 offers 1M token context and top leaderboard scores.
xAI announced the retirement of eight older Grok models effective May 15, 2026, recommending specific migrations to newer models. Most models should be moved to Grok 4.3, which offers a 1 million token context window, three reasoning effort levels (low, medium, high), and top scores on agentic tool calling and instruction following. Pricing is $1.25/1M input and $2.50/1M output. For non-reasoning workloads, the article suggests using Grok 4.3 with "none" reasoning effort (or low reasoning effort for less latency-sensitive tasks). For code workloads, Grok 4.3 delivers improved agentic coding and web dev capabilities. For image generation, the replacement is grok-imagine-image. Migration involves simply changing the model field in API requests.
- Six Grok models (including grok-3, grok-4-fast variants, and grok-code-fast-1) will be retired on May 15, 2026 at 12:00pm PT.
- Grok 4.3 replaces all retired models with a 1 million token context window, three reasoning effort levels, and top leaderboard performance in agentic tool calling and instruction following.
- Pricing is set at $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens; migration is as simple as changing the model field in API requests.
Why It Matters
xAI streamlines its model lineup to a single superior offering, forcing developers to upgrade for better performance and lower costs.