How to use
xAI API.

1. 01

   Start at https://console.x.ai/ and confirm the domain before entering account or payment information.

2. 02

   Availability: The xAI API is managed through the browser-based xAI Console and accessed from server applications through REST, the xAI SDK, OpenAI-compatible clients, and supported JavaScript libraries.

3. 03

   An xAI account and funded team, a server-side API key, approved models and data retention, rate and spend budgets, representative evaluations, tool authorization, content and media controls, observability, and incident ownership.

4. 04

   Sign in with the account you intend to keep using, then review plan, data, notification, and permission settings.

5. 05

   Run one low-risk test task before connecting sensitive files, repositories, or workspace data.

• Use official download pages.
• Review permissions during setup.
• Keep installers and applications updated.

1. 01

   Define the user task, modalities, data classes, quality and safety metrics, latency, tools, storage, retention, cost, approval, and rollback requirements.

2. 02

   Create a dedicated team key, keep it server-side, choose a current model from the authenticated models endpoint, and decide whether default retention, store=false, or team-wide Zero Data Retention fits the workload.

3. 03

   Build a frozen evaluation set and make a bounded Responses API request with explicit instructions, output schema, tools, token and request limits, timeouts, retries, and redacted request telemetry.

4. 04

   Test quality, safety, privacy, tool authorization, latency, rate limits, media lifecycle, and total task cost, then canary with quotas, human approval for consequential actions, and a tested fallback.

• State the outcome before the background.
• Provide the real source material.
• Review the result before expanding the task.

1. 01

   Restate the intended behaviour and the acceptance criteria before reading a single generated line.

2. 02

   Read the diff rather than the chat summary; the summary describes intent, the diff describes what actually changed.

3. 03

   Run the test suite, then write a test that would fail if the change were wrong, and confirm it passes for the right reason.

4. 04

   Check the edges the model tends to skip: error paths, null and empty cases, concurrency, and migration or rollback behaviour.

5. 05

   Trace every new dependency, network call, and file write, and confirm each one is genuinely required.

• Review the diff, never the description of the diff.
• A passing test suite proves the tests pass, not that the change is correct.
• Keep changes small enough that a human can actually review them.

1. 01

   Decide what the tool may read and what it may write before connecting a repository.

2. 02

   Scope tokens and integrations to the narrowest repository, branch, and permission set that still works.

3. 03

   Keep secrets out of the context window: use environment variables and secret stores, never inline credentials.

4. 04

   Require review before generated code touches authentication, payments, permissions, migrations, or deletion paths.

5. 05

   Audit what the integration retained after the session, and revoke access that is no longer needed.

• By default, xAI says API requests and responses are encrypted at rest and retained for 30 days for abuse auditing, though not used for training without explicit permission. Team-wide Zero Data Retention prevents prompt and output persistence but disables or changes stored Responses, Files, Collections, Batch, deferred, media, and voice-history features. Keep keys server-side, verify the response retention header, minimize data, set storage deliberately, authorize tools outside the model, expire or delete files and public URLs, and never expose model-selected actions directly.
• Follow your organisation's approved-use policy.
• Never treat fluent output as authorization to act.

• xAI API quickstart ↗
• xAI models API ↗
• xAI API security and retention ↗
• xAI file lifecycle ↗

Working on something like this? See how we handle product engineering, or book a call.