Grok 4 arrives: four frontier labs, and what that does to prices

xAI released Grok 4 today, 9 July 2025, with native tool use, real-time search and a larger context window, available through subscription tiers and its API.

Assessing whether it is better than the alternatives is a job with a short shelf life, as February demonstrated when three frontier models arrived in twelve days. The structural fact is more useful.

Four suppliers is the news

Eighteen months ago, a Swiss SME buying AI capability had effectively one serious choice and a fallback. Today there are four labs shipping comparable frontier models, plus a credible European option and a growing set of open-weight alternatives.

That is the market structure that produces the price behaviour this blog has documented since October: prompt caching in the first week, an eighty per cent cut on reasoning in June, and a rough halving each year.

Competition does that. Four suppliers do it faster than two.

What a buyer should and should not do

Should not: evaluate each new release. You will evaluate forever and deploy nothing. That warning is from 28 February and has held up.

Should: make sure your tooling can use more than one. The model-swap question from February, the connection standard from March, the toolkits from April — all three were building toward exactly this situation, where the sensible position is to be able to move rather than to have picked correctly.

The caution that applies here specifically

A model tightly coupled to a live social platform is a different data proposition from one that is not. If you are evaluating this for business use, the questions from 4 July apply with particular force: where does the text of my question go, what is retained, and is it used for anything besides answering me?

Get the answer in writing for your tier, not from a general marketing page. That is true of every provider; it is worth being explicit when the product and a public platform share a company.

The through-line

Your job is not to know which of the four is ahead this month. It is to have built nothing that cares.