Effective 2 November 2026, the grok-imagine-image-quality model slug is retired from the xAI API. Requests continue to resolve but are served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 with quality set to low.

grok-imagine-image-2.0 now covers everything grok-imagine-image-quality was used for, at a lower price. Effective November 2, 2026, the grok-imagine-image-quality model slug is retired from the xAI API. Its 60-day notice period began on September 2, 2026.

What was announced

From the SpaceXSI migration guide:

  • Starting 2 November 2026, requests to grok-imagine-image-quality on /v1/images/generations and /v1/images/edits are served by grok-imagine-image-2.0 with quality: “low”.
  • The request and response shapes are unchanged. The model field on responses reports the model that served the request.
  • Requests to grok-imagine-image-pro (which already redirected to grok-imagine-image-quality) follow through to grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low.
  • grok-imagine-image (1.0) is not affected.
  • grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality is $0.01 per image cheaper than grok-imagine-image-quality at every resolution. Continued use of the retired slug is billed at the low rate.
  • Recommended replacement is to switch explicitly to grok-imagine-image-2.0 so quality can be chosen (low, medium, or auto). Auto currently uses low for generation and medium for editing.

Context

The 60-day notice period began on 2 September 2026, as noted in the September release notes and the migration guide (last updated 2 September 2026). The slug continues to resolve after the retirement date, avoiding immediate breakage for existing code.

Limits of this report

This brief reports only the statements on the official migration page. It does not include independent verification of pricing tables, Arena rankings, or the exact quality of the low setting relative to the retired model. No staff post on X announcing the effective date was found in the search window.

Source

SpaceXSI Docs: grok-imagine-image-quality Retirement on November 2, 2026