Grok 4.8 and Grok 5 release dates: what Musk says

Grok 4.8 is xAI's next model: Musk says a soft rollout to Grok Bot users starts the week of November 10, 2026. Grok 4.9 and Grok 5 follow, with no dates yet.

Next model: Grok 4.8 · Expected: a soft rollout to Grok Bot users the week of November 10, 2026, per Elon Musk · After that: Grok 4.9, then Grok 5 · Grok 5 date: none given. None of this is an xAI announcement yet. Everything below is what Musk has posted on X, with the date he said it, set against what xAI has actually shipped.

When is Grok 4.8 coming out?

On November 10, 2026, Musk wrote that pre-training is done, that 4.8 "is in RL" (reinforcement learning, the final training stage) and that "the evals are starting to climb". He added that xAI "will do a soft rollout to Bot users later this week and see how it goes." That is the closest thing to a release date so far: a limited release inside Grok Bot during the week of November 10, not a full launch across every Grok app and the API on the same day.

A soft rollout usually means a share of users get the new model first while the team watches quality, speed and cost, then widens access. Grok Bot is a natural place to start. Bots run long jobs on their own computer, so xAI sees a lot of real agent traffic there quickly, and Musk has already said Grok Bot is where a fast version of 4.8 will do most of the work.

There is no API model name, price, context window or benchmark for Grok 4.8 yet. Until xAI publishes those, it is not in our Grok API pricing guide, and anything you read about its price is a guess.

Why the date has moved

Treat "later this week" as a target. On September 14, Musk said Grok 4.8 "will finish training this week and start RL". About six weeks later, on October 30, he wrote: "I know it's taken longer than expected, but Grok 4.8 will not be a disappointment." The November 10 post explains part of the delay: xAI "dumped JAX/SGLang and rewritten the entire RL and inference stack from scratch in C/C++, which took some extra time." He also wrote "Lot of cleanup was needed on the SFT data", meaning the example conversations a model is fine-tuned on before reinforcement learning.

JAX is Google's framework for training machine learning models, and SGLang is a widely used open source engine for serving large language models. Replacing both with in-house C and C++ code is a large engineering bet. It can make training and serving faster and cheaper once it works, but it adds risk and time to the first model built on it, which is Grok 4.8.

Musk's earlier estimates have run late too, though by less. On July 28 he wrote that Grok 4.6 "releases around August 7"; it arrived on August 12. In the same post he said Grok 4.7 would follow "a few weeks later"; it launched on September 21, almost six weeks after 4.6. A slip of days to a few weeks is the normal pattern, so a Grok 4.8 rollout that starts this week but takes longer to reach everyone would fit.

What Musk has said about Grok 4.8

September 14: "Grok 4.8, which is a 2.5T model trained with our new C++ software stack, will finish training this week and start RL." In a second reply that day he said "Grok 4.8 will be a noticeable improvement" over Grok 4.7.

October 7: Quoting a post about Grok Bot picking other companies' models such as Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno depending on the task, Musk said most Grok Bot requests "are pretty simple and will be handled by a lightning-fast version of Grok 4.8 when that comes out." His stated principle is "to give Grok Bot users the best possible combination of speed & intelligence."

October 30: "Grok 4.8 will not be a disappointment." He added: "We're not optimizing for benchmarks and I really don't care how Grok does on those, but it will be incredibly useful."

November 10: Pre-training finished, reinforcement learning under way, a soft rollout to Bot users this week. He wrote that Grok 4.8 "will bear no resemblance to 4.7 (thankfully)" and that it "is not yet incredible, but, this time, the foundations are built right, so I expect it to evolve to be something special."

Read together, the message is consistent: 4.8 is a new foundation more than a polished final product, and xAI plans to keep improving it after release rather than wait for it to be finished.

How Grok 4.8 compares with Grok 4.7

Grok 4.7 is the model you can use today. It launched on September 21, 2026, and on the xAI API costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens for prompts under 200k tokens, with a 500k token context window. Musk's own assessment on September 14 was frank: Grok 4.7 "should be roughly on par with Opus 5.0, not 5.1. Better in some ways, worse in others. We need to fix multimodal performance." Full details are in our Grok 4.7 post.

By Musk's figures, Grok 4.8 is larger (2.5 trillion parameters against 2.1 trillion for 4.7) and is the first model trained and served on the rebuilt stack. Bigger is not automatically better or slower: he has said a lightning-fast version will serve most Grok Bot requests. Whether 4.8 fixes the multimodal gap he named is something only testing will show.

Grok 4.9 and Grok 5

Musk's September 14 roadmap put Grok 4.9 after 4.8, calling it "probably Astra/Fable class", a comparison with the strongest models from other labs. Of Grok 5 he wrote "maybe better than anything. We shall see." He has given no date for either.

Grok 5 has been promised for a while. At the Baron Capital conference in November 2025, Musk described it as a 6 trillion parameter model due in early 2026 and put its chance of reaching human-level intelligence at about 10%. On January 6, 2026, xAI's $20 billion Series E announcement said "Grok 5 is currently in training." On February 2, 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, and the company has since been renamed SpaceX Super Intelligence (SpaceXSI). Early 2026 passed without Grok 5, and the current roadmap puts it after Grok 4.8 and 4.9, which suggests 2027 is more likely than 2026, though nobody at xAI has said so.

Model sizes so far, per Musk

Grok 4.6: 1.5 trillion parameters, released August 12, 2026.

Grok 4.7: 2.1 trillion, released September 21, 2026, the current flagship.

Grok 4.8: 2.5 trillion, in reinforcement learning, soft rollout planned.

Grok 4.9: no size given yet.

Grok 5: about 6 trillion (Musk's November 2025 figure), in training since at least January 2026.

These counts come from Musk's posts and talks, not from xAI's model docs, which do not list parameter counts. For every model and launch since 2023 in one place, see our Grok timeline.

What it means for Grok Bot users

Nothing to do. Your Bots keep working, and there is no setting to switch on. If Musk's October 7 post holds, simple requests will move to a fast Grok 4.8 on their own, and harder jobs will keep going to whichever model suits them best.

Speed and cost matter more than usual right now. On November 1, Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot had been "unsustainably high relative to revenue", after many users hit their weekly allowance early (our report). A faster, cheaper model for everyday requests is the obvious way to give people more done per week without raising prices, which may be why Grok Bot gets 4.8 first.

If your routines feel different this week, a new model is the likely reason. Check anything that sends results to other people, and compare a few outputs with last week's before you rely on them.

Questions people are asking

Is Grok 4.8 out? Not generally. As of November 10, 2026, Musk says a soft rollout to Grok Bot users starts this week. Grok 4.7 is still the flagship on the API and in the Grok apps.

Will Grok 4.8 be on the xAI API? Probably, since every recent model has reached the API, but xAI has not said when or at what price. Grok 4.6 and 4.7 launched at the same price, so a similar price would not be surprising.

Is Grok 5 coming in 2026? Musk has not given a date, and two models sit ahead of it on his roadmap. Early 2026 was the last target he gave publicly.

Is Grok 5 AGI? Musk has put the chance of human-level intelligence at about 10%. That is his estimate, not a benchmark result.

We will update this post when xAI publishes Grok 4.8 details, and add the dates to the Grok timeline. For the latest launches, follow Grok news.