Grok and ChatGPT Tighten Usage as AI Costs Bite

Two of the biggest AI assistants are giving paying users less room. Over the Halloween weekend, subscribers to Grok Bot, the AI agent sold by SpaceX, found their weekly usage limits maxed out days before they were due to reset, some reporting meters jumping from 50% to 100% without using the bot, TechCrunch reports. On Sunday, 1 November, Elon Musk confirmed on X that it was not a glitch: "The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue."

In other replies, Musk asked one user whether a plan with more usage cost too much, and told another that cutting allowances was "just being sensible", according to The Next Web. He did not give a cost figure or say how the limits will change. Grok Bot plans run up to $200 a month.

From fastest growth to rationing

The squeeze comes weeks after SpaceX celebrated Grok Bot's growth. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said on the company's third-quarter earnings call that Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users in early October, more than double the month before, and Musk said he had never seen anything grow so fast, The Next Web reports. SpaceX said in a filing last month that AI makes up 52% of its income, according to TechCrunch.

Not every jump may have been deliberate. Users of the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX also owns, saw their weekly meters flip between 77% and 100% with no change in activity, and Cursor reported a billing and usage dashboard problem on Sunday that it later marked resolved, The Next Web reports. It is not clear whether that caused the Grok jumps.

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ChatGPT pools its allowance

OpenAI is tightening in a quieter way. In an email to users, it said it will merge the Chat and Work tabs in ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT and its coding agent Codex will now draw from the same usage allowance, TechCrunch reports. OpenAI says most users will not notice a difference, but that some, depending on how much they use and which model, may have to wait for their limits to reset more often. The merged app goes to selected users first.

Both moves land as the cost of running AI comes under scrutiny. OpenAI has cut its funding target from $30bn to $20bn, and Anthropic's IPO filing showed a $23.29bn quarterly net loss on almost $17bn of revenue.