Grok Imagine access turns inconsistent for X Premium users after OpenAI’s Sora shutdown

Grok Imagine appears to be acting inconsistently on regular X Premium accounts too, just days after it was already taken away from free users.

As we reported earlier, Grok Imagine had already been moved behind a paywall, cutting off free users from image generation and editing. Now the restriction seems to have tightened again, but not in a clean or consistent way, and that is hitting paying users who were still able to access the feature until very recently.

I noticed the change earlier today. Then, a quick search on X itself showed other users posting about the sudden restriction too.

Since I was able to use Grok Imagine just yesterday, it seemed the change had been made in the past several hours, around the same time OpenAI announced it was shutting down the Sora app.

In further testing, things got murkier. At one point, Grok Imagine started working again on my Premium account while I was in the middle of writing this article, but another team member still could not generate images or videos on Premium.

I’ve added two screenshots below. One shows the SuperGrok pop-up I kept seeing earlier, and the other is of a screenshot I just took showing image generation working fine.

So for now, this does not look like a clean, fully rolled-out paywall change. It could be a bug, a test, or some kind of staggered access shift. Still, Premium+ and SuperGrok accounts do appear to have more reliable access at the moment, based on both our testing and what users have been complaining about over the past few hours.

All this still lines up awkwardly well with the Sora news. Just over 12 hours ago, OpenAI announced that it was shutting down the standalone Sora app and redirecting focus elsewhere.

So, with one big competitor stepping back and Elon Musk saying the next Grok Imagine release will be “epic” and that xAI is “doubling down”, the timing is at least interesting. Whether this Premium weirdness is intentional or not is another question.

But even with that, it seems like Grok Imagine users paying top dollar still cannot catch a break. Reddit threads from the past several days show SuperGrok subscribers complaining that resets are taking much longer than before, with some saying usage caps that used to clear in a couple of hours are now dragging on for six to eight hours or more.

Some users have also claimed the practical video limit has dropped sharply, in some cases to around 10 generations per day, though that still appears to vary by output type and account behavior.

Put simply, Grok Imagine is getting harder to use across the board. Free users were cut off first, which we covered earlier, and now Premium users seem to be in a messy middle ground where access works for some and fails for others, while Premium+ and SuperGrok still appear to be the safer bets for the moment.

That said, I’m hoping it’s a nothingburger and instead is a temporary bug that people stumbled upon. We’ll keep an eye out for further details and will update the article accordingly. 

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