xAI moved Grok Imagine Video 1.5 from preview to full general availability on June 16, 2026, releasing it across the Imagine API, grok.com, and the platform's iOS and Android apps. The model holds the top position on the independent Image-to-Video Arena leaderboard at a price point 86 percent below the equivalent Sora 2 Pro tier. OpenAI discontinued its Sora consumer app on April 26, 2026, citing unsustainable compute economics, and while the Sora 2 API remains live on a deprecated track until September 24, 2026, OpenAI has announced no successor video product. Google's Veo 3.1 remains commercially available at rates starting from $9 per minute for the Fast tier and $24 per minute for Quality output, above Grok Imagine's $4.20-per-minute 720p API rate. The model registered a +52 Elo point improvement over Grok Imagine Video 1.0 and currently outranks Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Seedance 2.0, and Kling. The Elo system measures user preference on a general distribution of prompts, not specialized professional workloads. The motion coherence is a product of the underlying Aurora architecture, an autoregressive mixture-of-experts video generation engine that generates each frame in sequence.