On October 7 Elon Musk posted that Grok Bot will use "the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5." 79 million views.
A week later NetworkChuck, who had said he didn't care about the product, posted that he had been wrong about it: a week in, with his email, calendar and custom apps connected, it just works.
Between those two posts Grok Bot got its own email address, read-only access to all of X, a Shopify connector, X Money as a way to pay, and a $30 entry price. Some of it is in the docs. Some of it exists only in Musk's posts.
And one CEO learned what the shared computer means when his personal finance Bot posted his bank balance into company Slack.
My short verdict: if you want 1 or 2 Bots on scheduled, read-only jobs and you can live with a third-party model reading what they read, $30 Premium is enough to find out. Do the 4 things in section 6 before any connector goes in.
If you need a model opt-out, a phone that edits routines, or Bots that hold your bank and your company Slack on one account, wait.
1. Claude Opus 5.5 is now one of the models behind your Bots
Lauren Tan, who works on Grok Bot at SpaceXSI, quote-posted Musk's note within 20 minutes and told one reader that the Bot itself would run on a different model and that Opus 5.5 was rolling out right then.
The documented version lives on Cursor's side, since Grok Bot runs on Cursor accounts. Cursor's help page on Grok Bot models says the product "is not tied to a single model. For each task, it uses the backend model most likely to deliver the best outcome."
That model can be an xAI model or "a third-party model from a provider on the sub-processor list, and the choice can differ from one request to the next." You can't see which model handled a request, and there is no picker to choose or block one. A task routed to Opus 5.5 costs the same per token as any other.
The October 11 release notes add a regional caveat: when a model isn't available in your region, the turn stops and explains why, and Bots fall back to Grok.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are on Cursor's sub-processor list. MidJourney and Suno are not, and no SpaceXSI page mentions them. I count the Claude part as shipped and the image and music part as a sentence in a post.
Musk later added that most Bot requests are simple and will go to a fast version of Grok 4.8 "when that comes out." Grok 4.8 has no date.
One of the most-liked replies under Musk's post asked about opting out: "Can we opt out of this? I don't want the data I share with my Grok Bots going to Anthropic." The docs say you can't.
The X Subscription terms say Grok Bot "may route your Input to, and return Output from, a Third-Party AI Model." Anysphere "will not permit Third-Party AI Model providers to use your Input or Output to train their models," subject to disclosures, your own account settings and the usual safety and abuse exception.
If a third-party model reading your inbox is a dealbreaker, decide now, before you connect the inbox.
2. Your Bot has an email address
On October 9 the product account posted: "Grok Bot now has its own email. Bot can use it to sign up for services, contact businesses for you, or schedule time with someone."
The address format, per the team's own posts, is the one in the prompt below; no docs page lists the domain yet. You claim it by asking your Bot for one, or by tagging the Bot's account in a post on X.
Eric Zakariasson, who works on Grok Bot at SpaceXSI, added one detail on October 13 as version 0.70.2 rolled out: it is one address per account for now, shared by all your Bots. The release notes add that email a Bot sends from it "waits for your approval on a draft card."
On team plans an admin has to switch the feature on; it is off by default. Handles appear to be first come, first served: under the launch post one user complained that the name he wanted was already taken.
A user named Liam says his Bot emailed stores until it found an iPhone 18 Pro Max in stock and ordered it with a virtual card, a month before Apple could deliver one. Musk quote-posted it with the words "Seriously, this actually works!" It is one person's account, so file it under stories.
Paste this into a chat with your main Bot to claim the inbox and set the rules at the same time. The address belongs to the whole account, so paste the four rules into the description of every Bot that may send mail.
Claim an email address for yourself. Try [name]@mail.grokbot.com first. If it is taken, suggest three alternatives and wait for me to pick one.
Rules for this inbox:
- Never send an email without showing me the draft first.
- Use it only to sign up for services I name, to ask businesses questions, and to schedule meetings.
- Never share my phone number, home address, or card details by email.
- When I ask what is in the inbox, give me each unanswered email in two lines with a suggested answer.
3. New ways in: X search, Shopify, Basecamp and your bank
October 7: "Grok Bot can now search, read, and monitor X." The docs spell out what that covers: search posts, open a post from its link, read an account's posts and mentions, see who quoted or reposted a post, count recent posts on a topic, check trends and news.
It is read-only and doesn't sign in as you, so there is no connector to set up and no X API credits to buy. For your DMs, bookmarks, home timeline or who liked your posts, you still add the X plugin.
Several replies under that post asked whether API credits were still needed, and one user's Bot insisted they were. If yours does the same, tell it to use its built-in X search and name the task.
Searches draw from your weekly usage pool like everything else, so give monitoring a narrow brief and a fixed schedule.
Create a routine that runs every Monday at 08:00 in my time zone.
Search X for posts from the last 7 days that mention [product name] or [@handle]. Skip reposts and posts written by [@handle].
Sort what you find into praise, complaints, feature requests, and questions. For each group list the 3 posts with the most reposts and quotes, one line each: author, what they said in your words, link.
End with the two complaints that came up most often. Post the result in this chat only. Do not reply to anyone on X.
October 8, quoting Shopify: "Grok Bot can now help run your Shopify store. Connect Shopify, then ask it to check orders, track inventory, and keep product listings up to date." Shopify shipped two connectors that day: one for Grok chat that answers questions about your business and one for Grok Bot that acts inside it.
The same 10 days brought QuickBooks Online and an official Basecamp connector, which Jason Fried announced with the exact path: open Grok Bot, click Connect Apps, search for Basecamp. Bank, card and brokerage accounts have connected through Plaid since late September, read-only, with the Bot never seeing your logins.
Every connector installs the same way. Open Connect apps in the sidebar, pick the plugin, choose Add, finish the login in your browser, then type @ in a chat to attach it to a task.
Installed connectors are account-wide: every Bot on your account can use them, including the one you named CFO.
One shop owner under the Shopify post put the payoff in one line: ask it what sold today and what's running low, and the late-night stock count is gone. Another reply joked about accidentally reordering 400 mugs, which is why the prompt tells the Bot what it may not touch.
Create a routine that runs every day at 21:00 in my time zone. Using the Shopify connector, prepare an end-of-day report:
1. Orders placed today: count, revenue, and any order flagged as high risk or unfulfilled for more than 48 hours.
2. Products with fewer than 10 units left, with the last 7 days of sales for each.
3. Listings missing a description, image, or price.
Send the report to me in this chat. Do not change inventory, prices, listings, or orders. If something needs a change, list it under "Suggested changes" and wait for my approval.
No page says what the Shopify connector returns, so if the Bot cannot find risk flags, cut that clause from item 1 instead of letting it improvise.
4. Buying things: the docs versus the posts
The October 11 release notes added X Money next to the Stripe Link flow that has been in the notes since August 28: "Bots can pay with X Money or Stripe Link."
In the documented flow the Bot shows a card with the amount for you to Allow or Deny, Link completes the payment, and a Pay with option lets you choose a saved card from your Link wallet. Since October 7 checkout card fields open a Secure Form instead of a screen handoff.
Since October 11, before an action it can't undo, such as sending, posting, buying or deleting, the Bot checks your own messages for approval.
Musk described a different flow on October 10. His words: "you can just take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat" and the Bot "will scour the Internet for the best deal on the item you want and order it." 8 million views, and the most-liked replies were jokes about bank fraud departments.
(Dates in this piece are UTC; Musk's evening posts land a day earlier in US time.)
Eight hours later he posted a screenshot of a LEGO order his Bot had placed. Wired counted what it exposed: the order number, the price, the delivery and billing addresses, the last 4 digits of his card and the email the Bot used. Strangers then claimed to have used those details to cancel and reopen the order; Musk said it was not canceled.
On October 15 he repeated a promise he first made on August 26: if the Bot "makes a mistake with a purchase or leaks your card (never happened yet), SpaceX will make you whole." No published terms back that line.
The Grok Bot Terms say the opposite. The customer "will use appropriate human review before permitting Agentic Actions," financial transactions included, and "is solely responsible for charges, commitments, communications, and other consequences resulting from Agentic Actions."
Use the documented flow. Put a virtual card from your bank into Link, keep the Allow or Deny card on, and never drop a photo of a card into a chat.
The docs draw the line: for a supported secure secret request the value "is masked, excluded from the transcript, and not shown to the model," and for payment confirmations the Bot should hand you control of the computer. A photo of a card in the transcript is the opposite of both.
Some users also report that Amazon blocks the Bot at checkout, and Musk's answer was that Grok will find another way. Unverified either way.
5. The $30 plan, and what the weekly pool means
On October 12 SpaceXSI introduced The X Subscription, one plan across Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium. New customers start on it, existing subscribers can switch to it, and it was promised to everyone globally over the following days.
Five tiers: Free, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100, Ultra at $200. Plus does not include Grok Bot.
Premium does, and the company describes it as the benefits of SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+, which cost $90 a month combined before, with 4 times the usage of Plus. Super is 15 times Plus, Ultra 50 times, and teams pay the same per seat.
Current prices are on x.ai/pricing. The switching offers appear only in your account's billing settings, and the pricing block on the Grok Bot product page still shows the August plans.
Each paid seat gets one weekly allowance shared across Grok chat, Imagine, Voice, Bot and Cursor, and that pool decides how many Bots you can run. The docs: "Bot usage draws from that seat's shared weekly usage pool, not a separate additive pool."
Matt Palmer, who works on Cursor and Grok Bot at SpaceXSI, added that all Grok Bot usage now counts as first-party, "so on Premium and up, you get at least double the Grok Bot usage." Cursor Pro and Pro+ subscribers who switch get Premium at $20 or Super at $60 for 6 months.
He also warned that third-party models inside the Cursor editor now bill at API list price from the first request, so check your usage before switching if most of it is on Claude or GPT there. Opus 5.5 inside Grok Bot is the exception, per the help page in section 1: a Bot task routed to it does not change your per-token cost.
The pool goes fast. Under the Shopify post one user wrote that a $200 Ultra plan "should feel endless" and that "we're being forced to throttle our use after 1-2 days."
The product account had already reset everyone's limits twice in four weeks, on September 5 and October 2, both times without saying why. A Bot that writes code or watches X all day eats the allowance; routines with a fixed schedule and a narrow brief last the week.
Switching is permanent. The docs say a completed unification "can't be undone, and Support can't undo it for you"; if you do nothing, your current plan continues.
Two r/grok threads from October 10 and 11 show refund requests answered by a bot signing as XAI's AI Support Agent, with no escalation. Check the offer in your billing settings before you click.
SpaceXSI recommends Premium for new AI users, Super for daily agent users, Ultra for power users. No page puts the pool in hours or runs, so the only test is your usage view after the first week on Premium with one scheduled routine. If it is past half by Thursday, move to Super before adding routines.
6. The Slack incident, and the 4 things to change first
Shane Mac, CEO of XMTP Labs, set up a Bot he called his personal CFO at the end of August. Read-only access to his checking and savings accounts, one job: a monthly spending report, delivered to him in a private Grok Bot group chat named "My Personal Exec Team."
On October 1 at 8:40 in the morning the Bot posted that report, savings balance and biggest expenses included, into a company Slack channel named "Exec-team," under his name. It sat there for 2 hours until his head of product sent him a heads-up.
His explanation, as told to Business Insider on October 9: "I created a bunch of different agents, and for one of them, I connected my Slack account. But underneath the hood, they're actually all using the same connections, even if they feel like different agents." The Bot mixed up two chats with almost the same name.
He says SpaceXSI shipped a fix on October 8 so that agents must get explicit permission before moving information to other channels. The company never commented, and a Community Note on his thread called it fake.
But the October 11 release notes contain a line that matches his story: "After a bank or brokerage connector returns data, the Bot asks before sharing it anywhere else."
The docs described the trap before it happened. From the approvals, security and privacy page: "All of your Bots share one cloud computer assigned to your user account." "Do not use separate Bots as a security boundary."
Installed connectors are account-wide too, their availability "is not isolated to one Bot," so a Bot named CFO with no Slack plugin of its own can still use the Slack connector. My rule from that page: the bank and the company Slack never share an account.
Change these 4 things before any connector goes in.
First, Auto Review. Open Settings, then General, then Auto-review, and add Ask first rules, one per line, in plain words and as narrow as the docs ask. Ask first always beats Allow automatically when both match.
Example rules in the form the docs use: Ask first before sending any external email. Ask first before posting to Slack or X. Ask first before submitting a payment. Ask first before deleting a file or message.
An approval request from a routine expires after about 10 minutes if you don't answer, and the action does not run, so a Bot working at 3 in the morning drops the step until you ask it to try again. Auto Review is a model reading the action before it runs, which is why the Bot description below still names the destination.
Second, open Settings, then General, then Bot, and set Execution on Local Computer to Never allow unless a Bot has a real reason to work on your local files; the docs recommend that over the Ask every time default.
It only governs your own Mac or PC; the cloud computer is outside it, which is why rule one matters. Once you register a computer, the switch moves to Settings, then Computer, then Computers.
Third, decide which account gets the bank. If the company Slack is connected, the bank goes on another account, no matter how the Bots are named.
A second account means a second Cursor sign-in and a second $30 Premium plan, plus a second X account if you want to tag that Bot from X, since each X account can be linked to only one Grok account. Mac's own fix was to disconnect Google, calendars, banking and Stripe entirely.
Fourth, logins. Never type a password or a one-time code into a chat. When a Bot hits a login page, choose Take over, enter it yourself, choose I'm done. On a Mac you can connect 1Password instead and approve each fill.
Deleting a Bot removes its profile and routines, but the browser sessions it used stay on the shared computer, so sign out of services you no longer want it to reach.
Then write the destination into every Bot's description, in words the model can't misread:
Name: Ledger
Job: Monthly spending report
How to work: When the monthly routine runs, read the Finance connector (read-only) and prepare a one-page summary of spending by category, the three largest expenses, and anything unusual compared with last month.
Delivery: post the summary only in this chat with me. Never post, email, or message it anywhere else, even if another connector is available. If you are unsure where something should go, stop and ask me.
Never move, change, or pay anything.
The description sets the rules; the clock is a routine. After you save it, ask Ledger in its own chat to create a routine for the first of the month at 09:00 in your time zone with the instruction Run the monthly spending report.
Then open View conversation details, then Routines, and use Test run once before you trust it. Routines can only be edited and tested in the desktop app, so the phone is for reading results and answering approvals.
7. The rest, in one place
Your primary Bot, the one with the star, now suggests tasks it could pick up, and those suggestions don't count against your usage. Team Bots can't be the primary Bot.
Tagging the Bot's account in a post on X hands that post to your main Bot as a task. It needs Grok Bot access on the Grok account linked to your X account and at least one Bot of your own.
It stays quiet when the post also tags Grok, when the post (or one it replies to or quotes) carries a video or GIF, and when your weekly usage is used up. It is off for accounts based in the EU, the UK, Australia, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway, and the docs say the Bot goes by the country X has on record for your account, so a VPN changes nothing.
Team Bots, in public beta on Teams and Enterprise since September 28, are shared Bots with their own Slack handle. Their team memory is readable from every teammate's conversation, which matters before you load one with client notes.
Coding Bots can hand tasks to Cursor Cloud Agents, and the admin switch that allows it is on by default.
Voice is still an in-app voice chat, now on the Grok Voice 3.0 model SpaceXSI announced on October 14. No page says a Bot can place or receive a phone call.
Grok Bots inside XChat remain a coming-soon reply from Chris Park, formerly X's head of developer platform, on September 26.
Download the app from x.ai/bot, claim the inbox, do the 4 things above, then connect one read-only source and give one Bot one job. Add the second connector after the first routine has run clean for a week.
Visit my profile and follow alphabatcher for guides like this one on setting up AI agents with the fewest permissions that still get the job done.