Grok Imagine Review

Grok Imagine is the fastest generator anyone ships, and the speed turns out to be the product rather than a spec line. A clip comes back in five to thirty seconds, which is short enough that people keep pressing the button instead of composing a prompt, and xAI said in February that the tool had produced 1.245 billion videos in the previous thirty days.

It arrived on July 28, 2025 as a beta inside the Grok app, making six second clips with sound, which Musk described as an AI Vine. Imagine 1.0 in early February 2026 took that to ten seconds at 720p with far better audio, and the 1.5 video model landed at the end of May and went wide on June 17, topping the image to video arena with a 52 point Elo jump over 1.0, ahead of Seedance 2.0 and Veo.

Then there is the rest of it. In January the tool was used at scale to undress photographs of real women on request, and it produced sexualised images of children. Indonesia and Malaysia blocked Grok on January 12, the first countries to do so, and the Philippines followed within days. Ofcom opened an investigation into X under the Online Safety Act, the European Commission ordered X to preserve its Grok records through the end of 2026 under the Digital Services Act, and the Paris prosecutor folded the allegations into an existing case.

The answer from xAI was enforcement rather than capability: image generation was restricted to paying subscribers on January 9 and the filters were tightened. The spicy mode that shipped in 2025, which produced explicit video of a named singer from a harmless prompt, is where this started, and it was a choice rather than an accident.

That history is not a footnote to the review, it is the review. A generator that cannot be relied on to refuse is one no business can put in a workflow, and a tool that is blocked in your market is not a tool. What is left is a quick and genuinely enjoyable toy with a permitted range that keeps narrowing, and the thinking and coding grades below record something that does neither and claims neither.

The free tier closed on March 19, 2026, so the price of finding out is a subscription: X Premium or Premium+, or SuperGrok at $10 a month for Lite, $30 for the standard plan, $100 for Plus and $300 for Heavy, with API access open since January 28. Against Kling or Veo it is looser on complicated blocking and shorter on clip length. Against all of them it is faster.