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Elon Musk's ChatGPT competitor, Grok AI, is currently only available for those with an X Premium+ subscription. That may not be true for much longer as Musk says regular premium subscribers will get the feature sometime this week.
Musk tweeted the news yesterday and as of this writing, the feature remains locked to Premium+ subscribers. Additionally, Community Note-takers point out that Grok is still region-locked as well, so not every Premium subscriber will have access to it when it expands.
As TechCrunch notes, there are two main reasons why X would extend its AI bot to lower subscription tiers. The first is to help boost subscriber numbers. Premium is less expensive than Premium+ ($8 vs. $16) and chatbot access may entice some users who were on the fence. It could also help bolster X's worth, which has been floundering in recent months.
Grok, meanwhile, is built to compete with ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, both of which cost $20 per month for their Pro versions. So X Premium and Grok is more affordable at $8 per month, though ChatGPT and Claude are more mature with larger data sets and extras like plugins.
One of the potential downsides of Grok being accessible at a lower subscription tier is that it gives users less of an incentive to subscribe to Premium+, which also drops advertising, offers the ability to write and format longer posts on X, and features the highest reply prioritization. However, some users have responded to Musk's tweet to say that removing Grok as a unique feature of Premium+ will make the tier feel less impactful than it once was.
The move also comes two weeks after Musk made Grok open-source. Musk has also been embroiled in a public spat with OpenAI and has gone so far as to sue ChatGPT's creator. OpenAI is working to get the lawsuit thrown out.