# BlockRun.AI vs xAI API (Grok) (slim)

> BlockRun.AI scores 78.9 (A) to xAI's 71.7 (BB) for llm inference. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/blockrun-ai-vs-xai-api.md (~6,600 tokens) · this version ~3,230 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/blockrun-ai-vs-xai-api.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/blockrun-ai-vs-xai-api
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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BlockRun.AI scores 78.9 (A) on agent readiness against xAI API (Grok)'s 71.7 (BB), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. xAI API (Grok) leads on security & auth. Both do llm inference. BlockRun.AI accepts x402. xAI API (Grok) doesn't.

- BlockRun.AI: A 78.9, rank #20 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/blockrun-ai.min.md
- xAI API (Grok): BB 71.7, rank #152 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/xai-api.min.md
- BlockRun.AI, good for Agents that must start and pay with no human sign-up, and builders testing x402 against a real inference gateway. Ahead on Reliability, 65 against 55; Payments & pricing, 100 against 20; Maintenance & community, 85 against 77; Transparency & trust, 73 against 63. Also An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account; Runs on your own machine.
- xAI API (Grok), good for Agents that want a capable model at a low per-token price with built-in web and X search, remote MCP and voice, and teams that need self-serve ZDR or US-only processing. Ahead on Security & auth, 97 against 61. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.

| Category | BlockRun.AI | xAI API (Grok) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 65 | 55 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 90 | 88 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 88 | 90 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 61 | 97 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 100 | 20 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 73 | 63 |

| Fact (where they differ) | BlockRun.AI | xAI API (Grok) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | MCP server | Model API |
| Vendor | BlockRun, Inc. | SpaceXSI (xAI) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://api.x.ai/v1` |
| Transports | stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| x402 | yes | no |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary service under xAI's enterprise terms of service. The Python SDK is Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 19 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| MCP registry | `io.github.BlockRunAI/blockrun-mcp` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-28 | 2026-11-02 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-09-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 5 stars, 679 PyPI/wk | 597 stars, 912k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | none |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, BlockRun.AI +80: BlockRun.AI 100 (x402 v2 on its own gateway, USDC on Base and Solana, and since MCP 0.55.0 (28 October) on Circle's Arc through arc.blockrun.ai (40). Per-token prices per model published without a login, plus a flat $0.001 fee per wallet call on Base (20). Seven free models per the status page's menu, no card or sign-up, and a wallet costs nothing to create (20). An agent can create its own wallet and pay per request with no human sign-up (20). 40 + 20 + 20 + 20 = 100.); xAI API (Grok) 20 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-token and per-call prices published without a login on docs.x.ai/developers/pricing (20). No free tier found for the text API, and the quickstart says to load the account with credits (0). Sign-up is in the browser at console.x.ai. The Management API can create keys and top up prepaid credit, but only with a management key made by a person in the console, so no line credit (0).)
- Security & auth, xAI API (Grok) +36: BlockRun.AI 61 (MCP and API reading. The credential is a wallet private key, auto-created at `~/.blockrun/.session` or passed in an environment variable and optionally mirrored to the OS keychain, and it controls the whole balance. `blockrun_wallet` can delegate a capped budget to a child agent, and an API-key route backed by account credit exists (20 of 30, as on 1 October). `blockrun_polymarket_read` gives read-only positions and previews apart from the trading tool, trades need `confirm:true` with a $25 default order cap, `--profile` drops whole groups of tools, and `BLOCKRUN_CONFIRM_SPEND=on` pauses every paid call for approval, though it's off by default (16 of 20). Search, Exa, market and RPC tools return third-party content, and no prompt-injection guidance was found in the README or docs read (5, as knock and suprsend). Every payment settles on-chain and the wallet tool reports balances and spending (10 of 15). security.txt is valid on 1 November, with an email contact, a policy link and an Expires date of 1 November 2027, and SECURITY.md takes private GitHub reports with a 72-hour acknowledgement and a 7-day plan for fund-affecting issues. No bounty or certification found (10). 20 + 16 + 5 + 10 + 10 = 61.); xAI API (Grok) 97 (Model reading. Team API keys with ACLs per endpoint and per model, QPM and TPM caps, expiry, and create, rotate, disable and delete through the Management API, plus documented mTLS. GitHub secret scanning disables leaked keys and emails the owner (30). The security FAQ says SpaceXSI never trains on API inputs or outputs without explicit permission (20). Requests and responses are kept 30 days for abuse auditing, then deleted, and team admins can switch on zero data retention themselves, confirmed by an `x-zero-data-retention` header on every response (15). Console audit log and a Management API audit-events endpoint, plus optional per-key request logging (15). security.txt valid to 2027-06-29 with a HackerOne bug bounty and a separate safety contact for prompt-injection issues. SOC 2 Type 2 is claimed in the security FAQ with the reports behind an NDA in the trust centre, so 17 of 20. Remote MCP doesn't support `require_approval`, which the model checklist doesn't score but reviewers should see. New in October, a `guidelines` array lets the caller make the model decline nsfw, violence or profanity content, which the checklist doesn't score.)
- Reliability, BlockRun.AI +10: BlockRun.AI 65 (Read with the local-software lines, as the listing's kind is `mcp` and the owner runs the server over stdio, though every paid call lands on BlockRun's gateway (the reading assymetrix-mcp and copilot-studio-mcp get). The 1 October check read it as a router. Installs from the official npm package `@blockrun/mcp` with Node 20.19 or later stated in `engines` (20). The CI workflow runs typecheck, build and tests on Node 20.19 and 22 on every push and pull request, with a required gate job. Run results weren't readable, as GitHub's pages answered 403 (20 of 25). Open issues couldn't be read. The changelog names numbered reports fixed in releases, such as #176 and #177 in 0.54.3 and 0.54.4 (10 of 25). Semver numbering with breaking changes marked BREAKING in CHANGELOG.md and shipped as minor bumps, as its own entries say (15). Version 0.55.0, pre-1.0 (0). 20 + 20 + 10 + 15 + 0 = 65. For the gateway behind it, blockrun.ai/status still shows live checks of the Base and Solana gateways and says "None recorded on this page yet" under incident history, the terms still say "We do not commit to any particular uptime", and free models are limited to 30 requests a minute and 300 an hour per IP with 429s carrying Retry-After.); xAI API (Grok) 55 (Status page at status.x.ai with components for the global and US API endpoints, voice, the consumer apps and, since the Cursor merger, Cursor's services, with an RSS feed (20). The feed, read on 6 November, now holds 267 incidents back to 11 August, so the whole 90-day window is readable. On the API components there were high error rates on grok-4.6 and grok-4.5 from 21:57 to 23:28 UTC on 17 August (about 90 minutes) and a models outage on the global and US endpoints from 13:30 to 17:09 UTC on 3 September (about 3 hours 40 minutes), so several majors. A 26-minute datacenter outage across the API on 22 September, voice disruptions of 12 and 28 minutes on 10 September and 6 October, a 63-minute voice and Imagine degradation on 30 October and a 37-second model degradation on 24 October add to the record (0). Rate limits published per model and tier, grok-4.7 at Tier 0 is 150 requests a second and 50M TPM, with the per-second cap derived as RPM divided by 48 (15). The rate-limits page shows exponential backoff on 429, but no Retry-After header or overload guidance was found (10 of 15). No SLA found in the docs or llms.txt (0). The Responses API has been GA since September 2025 and grok-4.7 carries no preview label (10).)
- Transparency & trust, BlockRun.AI +10: BlockRun.AI 73 (The editorial half. The MCP server and SDKs are MIT and the gateway is closed. The listing is graded as the MCP server, so 30 as assymetrix-mcp got for an MIT server in front of a closed API (was 15 under the router reading). The terms and privacy policy, both last updated 21 October 2026, now name the same entity, BlockRun, Inc., as contracting party and data controller. The privacy policy now says prompts, completions and tool calls to blockrun.ai, arc.blockrun.ai, nano.blockrun.ai and api.blockrun.ai are stored with the paying wallet or account and kept "until we delete it; it has no fixed expiry", usage records and connection metadata for 13 months, while the Solana gateway keeps no request content. The 1 October policy said prompts weren't stored past the request and metadata was kept 30 days. The documents agree with each other, but content has no retention period and no subprocessors are named (18 of 30, was 20). No deprecation policy, and the terms say a provider may withdraw a model at any time. Removals are dated in the changelog, such as Gemma 4 31B delisted on 2 October, the same day (5 of 20). Upstream providers are named and Google Analytics is disclosed with its cookies and retention. Data locations aren't stated, and whether the MCP server sends telemetry wasn't read (10 of 20). 30 + 18 + 5 + 10 = 63.); xAI API (Grok) 63 (Closed service under xAI's enterprise terms, with the Python SDK under Apache-2.0 (15). The docs agree with each other on no training, 30-day abuse retention, 30-day storage of stateful responses and the ZDR route, but the privacy policy, enterprise terms and DPA at x.ai/legal answered a Cloudflare block page on 6 October and again on 6 November, so they couldn't be compared (15 of 30). Dated migration guides and redirect tables for each retirement, but no written deprecation policy, and Chat Completions, Anthropic compatibility and grok-voice-2.0 are labelled deprecated with no date (12 of 20). The US regional endpoint states what stays in the US, the global endpoint guarantees no region, and no subprocessor list was readable (10 of 20).)
- Maintenance & community, BlockRun.AI +8: BlockRun.AI 85 (MCP reading. @blockrun/mcp 0.55.0 published to the official MCP registry on 28 October 2026, and a gateway changelog entry on 25 October (30). 40 registry versions from 0.35.0 on 3 August to 0.55.0 (20). Issue replies couldn't be read, as GitHub's issue pages answered 403; the changelog credits numbered reports fixed within releases (10 of 25). Listed in the official MCP registry as io.github.BlockRunAI/blockrun-mcp, a GitHub-verified namespace, active, with 0.55.0 marked latest (15). CI on Node 20.19 and 22 with typecheck and tests on every pull request, and a Renovate configuration in the repository (10). 30 + 20 + 10 + 15 + 10 = 85.); xAI API (Grok) 77 (Model reading. grok-imagine-image-quality and grok-imagine-image-pro retired on 2 November 2026 as announced in September, Grok Voice 3.0 and custom moderation controls in October, Grok 4.7 on 21 September (30). No minimum notice period found. Retirements come as dated migration guides, retired slugs redirect to a replacement rather than failing, billed at the replacement's price, and grok-voice-2.0 was deprecated in October with no end date (4 of 12). Shutdowns in the last 90 days with dates given in advance, `grok-voice-transcribe-1.0` on 2 October and `grok-imagine-image-quality` on 2 November (8 of 8). Release notes several times a month but dated only by month, support by email and a Discord #help channel, not tested. On xai-sdk-python a collaborator commented on 2 of the 16 most recent threads with replies, and most outside pull requests since 23 October are open without a maintainer reply (10 of 15, down from 12). The repository has CI, release and version-bump workflows (5 of 10). One current first-party SDK, `xai-sdk` 1.21.0 tagged on 23 October, Python only (10 of 15). Supported runtimes stated, Python 3.10 or later (10).)