Author: Nadali. Prepared with AI assistance.
What changed
The official xAI release notes set 2 November 2026 as the retirement date for grok-imagine-image-quality: requests move to grok-imagine-image-2.0 with quality: low. The announcement was made on 2 September, not today. The migration guide says the old name continues to resolve; this is not a service-outage report.
Who benefits: shop owners and small marketing teams whose contractor uses this API to prepare visuals. The takeaway: a working request does not establish that its output is unchanged.
What to check with your contractor
Nadali’s suggested review process:
- Identify the specific workflow using this model name. Do not change other services just because their names look similar, and do not put access keys in the inventory.
- Ask the responsible specialist to check the model in the API response: the documentation describes this field as a way to identify the serving model. We did not make such requests.
- Agree on a small set of safe source materials and acceptance criteria. For a product, these could include shape, colour, bundle contents and legibility of its actual label. This is a proposed review, not a result of our testing.
- Compare finished files with originals before using them in a catalogue or advertisement. If a product is distorted, keep a verified photograph rather than accepting the result simply because generation completed.
- Record agreed settings and actual costs. The pricing table distinguishes quality and resolution levels; the API price is not the full cost of producing material with human review.
Availability and limits
This concerns a specific API identifier; it does not establish identical behaviour across all Grok apps. Nadali read public sources on 2 November but did not inspect customer accounts, invoices or files generated by this model. Comparative quality and savings have not been established.
The cover is a reused conceptual AI illustration of checking records and shapes, not an xAI output.
