Paying users of Grok Bot, the AI agent from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, woke up over the Halloween weekend to find their weekly usage limits used up, in some cases jumping from about half to 100% overnight. Musk has now confirmed it was deliberate, saying the cost of running the agent was too high for what it earns.
The admission came in a reply on X on 1 November, where Musk wrote that “the cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue”. He did not say what the new limits are or how they will change for each plan.
A product that was only just celebrated
The timing is awkward. Less than two weeks earlier Musk had called Grok Bot the fastest-growing product he had ever seen, and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell cited 800,000 paying users per week in early October, over twice the previous month’s number. Grok Bot browses websites, answers email and logs into accounts on a user’s behalf, and its quota is shared with Grok and with the coding platform Cursor, according to The Decoder. The same report says the Telegraph found several users with their quotas cut roughly in half, and that one user had to wait days for a fresh allowance, after which Musk asked whether a pricier plan would be too expensive.
The money side is in TechCrunch’s report, which also collected the complaints from users. In a filing last month, SpaceX said AI now makes up 52% of its income, and its renamed Super Intelligence division made a $431 million profit, which is rare in the AI industry. One-off charges of $1.2 billion tied to the Cursor purchase held it down.
Grok Bot is not the only agent product running into this. The Decoder notes that OpenAI is merging its Codex and Chat quotas from December, and that Anthropic puts the cost of an agent at four to 15 times that of a simple chat. Agents that work for long stretches use far more computing than a chatbot reply, which is why flat monthly plans are being tightened across the industry.
Musk’s reply is the only official word so far. Until SpaceX publishes the new allowances, subscribers cannot tell how much of their plan remains.
