Grok is coming for the coding-focused customers of its bigger rivals. Elon Musk’s xAI dropped a new AI model this week, specifically for developers, calling it a «speedy and economical reasoning model» meant to help with coding projects.
The new addition, dubbed grok-code-fast-1, helps round out the family of Grok 4 models, released earlier this year. The coding model is agentic, meaning it is built to handle tasks without a ton of human oversight. xAI claims its model outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude 4 and xAI’s own Grok 4, saying it could solve 70.8% of real-life software problems, as evaluated by the SWE-bench.
However, the model card notes that the coding model has a higher rate of dishonesty than Grok 4, as spotted by PCMag. So you’ll want to double-check any critical work the AI does.
xAI co-founder Yuhuai Wu said on X that this is the first of many coding models to come.
The start of a new model line — Grok Code series.
This time we focus on speed. It’s a very new experience when the model is super fast.
Try it out, it’s free for 7 days on the major platforms. https://t.co/goJB8xCmPw— Yuhuai (Tony) Wu (@Yuhu_ai_) August 28, 2025
Agentic AI tools have been a popular development in the ever-tightening AI race, with OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft each releasing a version of a coding agent. xAI’s tool will be more similar to Microsoft’s in that it’s available via its API, i.e., not open to paying ChatGPT or Claude subscribers.
You can access the new model for free for the next few days through a number of exclusive platforms, including Github Copilot, Cline, opencode, Cursor, Kilo Code, Roo Code and Windsurf. You’ll need an API key, which is priced out by usage; you can learn more about that with this breakdown of Grok models. xAI also put together a prompt engineering guide specifically for the coding model to help developers get the most out of it.
AI in coding projects can be a tricky conundrum. Generative AI tools like chatbots have proven to be effective tools to help beginners upskill quickly and help professionals problem-solve. Agentic AI is beginning to show how it can help automate nonessential tasks.
That poses the question of whether automated tools could lead to widespread employment disruption, particularly for young software engineers. A new Stanford study finds a high risk for workers early in their careers with significant occupational exposure to AI, like software engineering and customer service.
The regular Grok chatbot and X/Twitter assistant has had its share of controversies. Earlier this summer, the chatbot started producing extremely racist and antisemitic content, a few days after xAI founder Elon Musk posted that the company had «improved Grok significantly.» xAI pulled the update soon after and shared that it had «taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.»
Bias is always an issue with AI chatbots, but Grok has illustrated how quickly the tech can spiral into being used to quickly produce potentially abusive content.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the parent company of CNET, in April filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
