xAI Retires 8 Legacy Models; Grok 4.3 Becomes Default API Model
xAI
Effective May 15, 2026, xAI retired eight legacy models from its API — including grok-4-fast-reasoning, grok-4-0709, grok-code-fast-1, and grok-3 variants — redirecting all traffic to Grok 4.3. Grok 4.3 is xAI's current flagship with built-in reasoning (four effort levels), a 1 million token context window, native video input, and pricing at $1.25/$2.50 per million input/output tokens. It tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (score 53 vs. median 35).
Why it matters
The forced migration consolidates xAI's model portfolio around a single flagship. The 1M context window and native video input make Grok 4.3 competitive with Gemini 2.0 Pro on long-context and multimodal tasks.
Importance: 2/5
Portfolio cleanup and API consolidation; Grok 4.3 release was May 6 (already past)