Elon Musk has confirmed that Grok Bot's usage limits were cut because the AI agent was costing more to run than it earned. "The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue," he wrote in a reply to a user on X on Sunday, confirming the change was not a technical glitch.
The move lands barely two weeks after Musk called Grok Bot the fastest-growing product he had ever seen, and it affects subscribers of SpaceX, which took the AI agent public earlier this year. Users first noticed over Halloween weekend, when some woke up to find their weekly quotas maxed out even though they had barely used the service.
Grok Bot usage limits cut, users say
Reports of the throttling spread quickly on X, with some users saying their weekly usage jumped from as low as 50% to 100% without any activity overnight. According to The Decoder, citing the Telegraph, several users saw their quotas slashed in half over the weekend, and one reported waiting days for a fresh allowance. Musk did not formally announce a cut, but his reply to the complaints speaks for itself.
Grok Bot is an agentic AI tool that browses websites, answers emails and logs into accounts, similar in spirit to Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dot and Anthropic's Claude Duet. It shares its quota with Grok and the coding platform Cursor, which SpaceX acquired. That shared pool means heavier use of any one service eats into the others, a detail that has frustrated paying subscribers.
What Grok Bot costs SpaceX
SpaceX has positioned Grok Bot as a flagship success. The company said in a filing last month that AI now accounts for 52% of its income, and its renamed "Super Intelligence" division posted a profit of $431 million, a rare result in the AI industry. That figure would have been higher without $1.2 billion in one-time costs linked to the acquisition of Cursor.
Musk has repeatedly pointed to the product's traction. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell cited 800,000 paying users per week in early October, more than double the previous month's number. Musk himself described Grok Bot as having "the fastest growth of a product that I've ever seen in my life." He has not yet said how the new limits will affect subscribers going forward, or whether he plans to raise prices.
