Grok Build: What It Is, What It Costs and How to Install It on a Mac

Grok Build is SpaceXSI's coding agent for the terminal, and since 12 October 2026 the free tier of the X Subscription includes a limited allowance of it. You install it with one command, type grok inside a project folder, and it reads the code, edits files, runs commands and searches the web, now on Grok 4.7. Most install guides still tell you to buy a $30 or $300 SuperGrok plan first. You no longer need one.

Three things changed since those guides were written. The Grok Build name now covers two different products, the plans moved on 12 October, and in July an independent researcher caught Grok Build uploading entire Git repositories to xAI's cloud. This guide sorts out all three, walks through a Mac install step by step, and ends with how Grok Build compares with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

The Key Takeaways

• Two products, one name: Grok Build is a terminal coding agent, and since 19 August 2026 it is also the app builder inside the Grok chat on the web, iPhone and Android.
• Free to try: the X Subscription lists Grok Build as "Limited" on Free and included from Plus at $8 a month. Premium at $30 gives four times the Plus usage.
• One-line install: curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash on a Mac or Linux, and a separate PowerShell installer on Windows.
• Open source since 15 July 2026: the Rust code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0, with about 27,000 stars.
• Check your history: version 0.2.93 uploaded whole repositories, Git history included, until SpaceXSI switched it off on 13 July. Rotate any secret that sat in a repo you used it on.

What Is Grok Build?

Grok Build is SpaceXSI's coding agent: a full-screen program that runs in your terminal, understands a codebase, edits files, runs shell commands, searches the web and manages long-running tasks. SpaceXSI is the company formerly called xAI, which SpaceX bought on 2 February 2026; its legal name is SpaceXAI LLC. The agent works three ways: interactively in the terminal, headlessly inside scripts and CI jobs, or embedded in editors through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

Since August the Grok Build name covers a second product as well, and most confusion about Grok Build comes from mixing the two up.

Grok Build in the terminal

The terminal version of Grok Build is the developer tool: you run it inside an existing project, describe a change, and review the diffs it proposes before they land. It picks up an AGENTS.md file, skills, plugins, hooks and MCP servers already in the repository. A team that uses another coding agent does not have to rewrite its conventions. This is the product the install queries, the GitHub repository and most of this guide refer to.

Grok Build in the Grok app (formerly Build Mode)

The second Grok Build lives inside the Grok chat on grok.com, iOS and Android. You describe a website, game, app or dashboard, and Grok builds a working version live in the conversation. SpaceXSI introduced it on 28 July 2026 as Build Mode, an early beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. On 19 August it announced that "Grok Build is now available on every plan, on the web and on mobile."

In-app Grok Build publishes each project to its own grok.me address. You choose who sees it: just you, anyone with the link, or the whole internet. A custom domain works too.

Published projects can store secrets for third-party keys, pull in data through connectors, and be remixed by other people. They can also be exported to GitHub, which is where the two products meet: SpaceXSI suggests picking an exported app up in the terminal version.

Grok Build Timeline: From a $300 Beta to Every Plan

Grok Build went from a beta for $300-a-month subscribers to a limited free tier in five months. SpaceXSI shipped the terminal agent first, on 14 May 2026, with this post from its official account:

An early beta of Grok Build, an agentic CLI for coding, building apps, and automating workflows is now available for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers.

Through this early beta, we will improve the model and product based on your feedback.

Try it at http://x.ai/cli

— SpaceX Super Intelligence (@SpaceXSI) May 14, 2026

The dates below come from SpaceXSI's news page and the public Grok Build changelog:

Is Grok Build Free? Plans and Pricing

Yes, with limits. On SpaceXSI's pricing page, the Grok Build row of the plan comparison reads "Limited" for Free and "Included" for every paid tier. The product page says Grok Build is "Available to try for Free". There is no separate Grok Build subscription. Access comes with the X Subscription, the only plan SpaceXSI has sold to new buyers since 12 October 2026.

Prices exclude tax, and SpaceXSI does not publish exact Grok Build caps for any tier, only the usage multiples in the table. On Plus, Grok Build draws from the same pool as Grok Chat, Voice and Imagine, so a long coding session leaves less for everything else. Existing SuperGrok and X Premium subscribers keep their old plans unless they switch. The full plan breakdown, including what Premium adds outside Grok Build, is in our Grok pricing guide.

Grok Build with an API key

Grok Build also runs on an xAI API key, billed per token instead of from a plan. Grok 4.7, the model Grok Build now uses, costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. SpaceXSI also serves a fast variant of Grok 4.7 at twice the output speed and twice the price. The older grok-build-0.1 coding model launched on the API at $1 in and $2 out per million tokens. Use a key for CI jobs and servers, where a browser sign-in is impossible.

How to Install Grok Build on a Mac

Installing Grok Build on a Mac takes one Terminal command and works on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs:

1. Open Terminal from Applications > Utilities, or press ⌘ Space and type Terminal.
2. Paste the installer command and press Return:

curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash

3. Quit and reopen Terminal so it picks up the new path, then check the install:

grok --version

4. Move into a project folder and start the agent. The first launch opens your browser so you can sign in with your Grok account:

cd ~/path/to/your-project
grok

What the Mac installer changes on your system

The Grok Build installer downloads the build for your Mac into ~/.grok/downloads and puts the grok command in ~/.grok/bin. It also installs a second command, agent, that starts the same program. Reading the script shows three details that most install guides skip:

The installer edits your shell profile. On the default zsh shell, it adds a marked "grok installer" block to ~/.zshrc that puts ~/.grok/bin on your PATH (bash and fish users get the same block in their own profile). The first time, it saves a backup copy of the old file. Keep your dotfiles in Git? Expect that change in your next diff.

It also avoids the Rosetta trap. If you run Terminal under Rosetta on an Apple Silicon Mac, the system reports an Intel chip. The installer checks the hardware anyway and installs the native Apple Silicon build, so you do not end up with a slower translated binary. Intel Macs get the Intel build.

And it can pin a version. Add a version number after the pipe, as in bash -s 1.0.62, to install that release instead of the latest stable one. That helps when a new release breaks your setup.

If Terminal still answers "command not found" after a restart, the PATH line did not load. Add export PATH="$HOME/.grok/bin:$PATH" to ~/.zshrc yourself, which is the line the installer prints for this case. To update later, run grok update.

How to Install Grok Build on Windows and Linux

Grok Build ships prebuilt binaries for Windows and Linux, and each has its own install route. On Linux, the Mac command works unchanged. On Windows you have three options:

The installers live at fixed addresses, which is why "x.ai/cli/install.sh" is itself a common search. Both scripts are plain text, so you can open https://x.ai/cli/install.sh in a browser and read what it does before you pipe it into a shell.

How to Use Grok Build: Your First Session

A first Grok Build session starts with grok inside a project and a plain-English request. SpaceXSI's own documentation suggests two openers:

Explain this repo.
@src/main.rs Walk me through this file.

For anything bigger than a small fix, start in plan mode. Grok Build writes a plan first and blocks every edit until you approve it. You can approve the whole plan, comment on single steps, or rewrite it, and each approved change then appears as a diff. When a request is ambiguous, Grok Build asks short multiple-choice questions, such as which framework or design direction you want, before it starts.

Two more commands cover most of what people search for after the install. Headless mode runs Grok Build inside scripts: grok -p "Explain this codebase" runs one task without the interface, and adding --output-format streaming-json returns machine-readable output for a script or bot. Signing in without a browser works with an API key: on a server, set export XAI_API_KEY="xai-..." before running grok, and usage is billed to the key instead of your plan.

You can also point Grok Build at another model. Add it to ~/.grok/config.toml, run grok inspect to see what the agent found, and switch inside a session with /model. The Composer 2.5 model has been in the Grok Build model menu since 1 June 2026.

What Grok Build Can Do

Grok Build's feature list has grown fast since May, and most of it is aimed at running several agents at once on bigger jobs.

Subagents, workflows and /goal

Grok Build hands large tasks to subagents that run in parallel, each with its own context. Each can work in its own Git worktree, so their edits do not collide. Workflows, added on 23 July 2026, go further. Describe a job like "triage the last 100 Linear issues and give me a top-10 action list", and Grok Build plans it as a script. It then fans the work out across up to 128 agents (or 1,024 for big jobs) in the background and reports back once. The /goal mode keeps a single agent working until a task is completed and verified, with a progress checklist you can watch. The Agent Dashboard, opened with grok dashboard, shows every running session on one screen.

Memory, skills and plugins

Since 16 September 2026 Grok Build has memory, controlled by a single on/off switch, [memory] enabled in the config file, so check that it is on. With memory on, Grok Build notes conventions, decisions and project facts after each turn, and later sessions read those notes before touching related code. /memory shows the notes and /dream sorts them into topic files. Repeated jobs become skills, and /skillify turns a finished session into one. The built-in plugin marketplace, opened with /marketplace, launched with plugins from MongoDB, Vercel, Sentry, Chrome DevTools and Cloudflare, each pinned to a specific commit.

Open-source code

SpaceXSI open-sourced the Grok Build harness and terminal interface on 15 July 2026. The GitHub repository holds the Rust source under the Apache 2.0 licence, and it includes code ported from OpenAI's Codex and the open-source opencode agent. Two limits apply: the public repository is synced from SpaceXSI's internal codebase periodically, and outside contributions are not accepted. You can still compile it yourself and point it at a local model.

Is Grok Build Safe? The July Repository Upload

Grok Build is safer today than it was in early July, but its history is the reason to read its privacy settings before you point it at private code. On 10 July 2026 a researcher publishing as cereblab released a wire-level analysis of Grok Build 0.2.93. It showed Grok Build uploading the entire tracked repository, with its full Git history, as a bundle to a Google Cloud Storage bucket. That upload ran separately from the files the model actually read.

The evidence was specific. The researcher used a 12 GB test repository of files the agent never opened. Model traffic came to about 192 KB, while the storage upload moved 5.10 GiB, a ratio of roughly 27,800 to one. A planted file the agent had been told not to open came back verbatim from the uploaded bundle. Turning off the "Improve the model" setting did not stop the upload. In the researcher's comparison run, Claude Code and Codex sent no repository bundle.

What SpaceXSI changed

On 13 July the same 0.2.93 version stopped uploading, because the server began returning a disable_codebase_upload flag. No client update was needed. SpaceXSI responded on X the same day:

We care deeply about your privacy and respect customer choice. For teams using zero data retention, no trace and code data is ever retained. All API key use of Grok Build also respects ZDR.

If ZDR is disabled, the /privacy command is available in the CLI to disable data retention, which also deletes previously synced data.

Run the /privacy command to view or change your settings at any time.

— SpaceX Super Intelligence (@SpaceXSI) July 13, 2026

Elon Musk added a deletion promise a few hours later:

True.

As a precautionary measure, all user data that was uploaded to SpaceXAI before now will be completely and utterly deleted. Zero anything whatsoever will remain.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2026

Two caveats survive the fix. The researcher tested /privacy and found it is a data-retention setting, not a block on what is sent. And nobody has independently confirmed the deletion.

A separate analysis of versions 0.2.99 and 0.2.101 found the upload code still shipping, held off by the server flag rather than removed. Five days after the original report, on 15 July, SpaceXSI published the full source code, so anyone can read how the harness works.

What to do before you run Grok Build on private code

Rotate old secrets first. Did you run Grok Build before 13 July on a repository that ever held an API key or password? Rotate that credential, including secrets deleted from the files but still sitting in the Git history. Then run /privacy in Grok Build to view your retention setting and turn retention off, which also deletes data already synced.

For company code, use zero data retention. SpaceXSI says teams on it never have trace or code data retained, and API-key use of Grok Build respects it too. Finally, keep plan mode on for anything sensitive. Approving each plan and diff is the simplest way to see what the agent reads and changes.

Grok Build vs Claude Code, Codex and Cursor

Grok Build costs nothing to try and its code is open source under Apache 2.0, the same licence as OpenAI's Codex CLI. Claude Code and Codex are the more established tools, and they were the clean results in the July upload comparison. Here is how the four compare on access and price in October 2026:

The Claude Code price is covered in detail in our Claude Code pricing guide, and Cursor's move onto the X Subscription in our Cursor pricing breakdown. Grok Build and Cursor now share one plan, so an X Subscription buys both agents and they draw from the same usage pool. SpaceXSI's own benchmark table puts Grok 4.7 behind Claude Fable 5.1 on terminal and long coding tasks, and well ahead on price. Those are SpaceXSI's numbers, not an independent test.

If you want Grok without the terminal

Plenty of people searching for Grok Build only want Grok's answers, not a coding agent in a terminal window. For that job you do not have to pick one AI company and install its tools. Fello AI puts Grok in a native chat window on your Mac, next to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek. When Grok's answer looks off, you ask another model the same question in the same window. It runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad, with a free tier to start.

The Verdict

Grok Build is worth installing now, mainly because the price barrier is gone. The free tier lets you try it on a real project, and Plus at $8 a month buys it together with Cursor. The terminal agent is a serious tool, with plan mode, parallel subagents, workflows and memory, and its open-source code lets you check what it does. Treat July as the deciding detail, not a footnote. Start it on a throwaway or open-source repository, run /privacy, and keep secrets out of any repo you point it at until you trust it. If you are already productive in Claude Code or Codex, nothing here forces a switch. If you pay for Grok or Cursor anyway, Grok Build is the agent you already own.

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