xAI made Grok Imagine Video 1.5 generally available on June 22, 2026, calling it the company’s best image-to-video model yet — and the numbers back it up. In blind user preference testing, Video 1.5 beat OpenAI’s Sora 2, Google’s Veo 3.1, and Kuaishou’s Kling, while costing 86% less per generated clip.
The Blind Benchmark Win
In head-to-head blind tests, users picked Grok Imagine Video 1.5 outputs over all three rivals without knowing which system produced any given clip. xAI attributes the win to improvements across the dimensions that matter for real creative work:
- Better motion and physics — movement holds together over the length of a clip, with fewer warps and more believable weight
- Native audio — sound effects, ambience, and dialogue generated in the same pass as the video
- Faster output — Video 1.5 Fast produces 6-second 720p clips in about 25 seconds, down from more than 40 seconds
Audio That Lands on the Action
Most text-to-video models need a second pass, or a separate audio model, to add sound. Grok Imagine Video 1.5 generates sound effects, ambience, and dialogue in a single pass, with speech that is clearer and better synced to mouth movement. That removes an entire post-production step for short-form creators.
86% Lower Cost Per Clip
Cost is where Video 1.5 separates from the pack. At roughly 86% below Sora 2 per generated clip, a clip that costs a dollar on Sora runs about fourteen cents on Grok Imagine. For teams generating hundreds of test shots while storyboarding, that gap swings real production budgets.
Availability
The model ships as grok-imagine-video-1.5 on the xAI Imagine API, and a faster 1.5 Fast variant has rolled out on grok.com/imagine plus the iOS and Android apps. New workflow features include Projects for organizing work, multiple parallel agents, and library search.
What This Means
With native synchronized audio and an 86% price advantage, xAI is attacking the two things that keep video models out of production: sound and cost. The win in blind benchmarks just makes the price gap harder for the incumbents to ignore.