The outcome

Use search and custom tools without prompt-injection escalation, cross-tenant access, uncontrolled side effects, or hidden retention surprises.

xAI API is a developer platform for Grok text, reasoning, vision, image, video, voice, realtime, retrieval, and tool-using applications. Building Grok-powered text, coding, reasoning, multimodal, media, realtime voice, retrieval, and tool-using applications through production APIs. This guide narrows that broad capability into one repeatable outcome, with checkpoints that keep the source material and your judgment in the loop.

Before you begin

Set the boundary before the tool starts.

Choose one real task, identify who will use the result, and decide what evidence or test will make the result acceptable. Gather only the source material needed for that task. If the work contains confidential, personal, regulated, or client-owned information, confirm that the platform and account are approved before sharing it.

Troiana principle

AI should make the work easier to inspect. If the workflow removes the source, the owner, or the review step, redesign the workflow.

Step by step

A workflow you can repeat.

  1. 01

    Define users, tenants, narrow tool allowlists, data boundaries, schemas, side effects, approval thresholds, budgets, stopping conditions, storage mode, retention, and audit fields.

  2. 02

    Create a dedicated server-side xAI key, choose an exact model, decide whether default retention, store=false or team-wide ZDR applies, and verify incompatible stored features before implementation.

  3. 03

    Minimize context, isolate untrusted web and file text, parse tool calls strictly, reject unknown names and fields, canonicalize arguments, and reauthorize every requested resource against current server state.

  4. 04

    Execute through scoped service identities with idempotency, timeouts, rate and spend limits; require explicit approval for writes, purchases, publication, messages, account changes, or sensitive disclosure.

  5. 05

    Test direct and indirect injection, confused deputy, forged IDs, tenant crossover, replay, parallel calls, exfiltration, denial, tool failure, cancellation, retention headers, and rollback before canarying.

Working standard

What good use looks like.

  • Authorize every tool outside the model.
  • Verify the active retention mode.
  • Make every side effect idempotent.

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.

Official references

Check the current product documentation.

Features, plan limits, availability, and data controls change. These official pages are the starting points used for this collection.