Grok CLI on your own GPUs.

xAI’s Grok Build CLI with LM Warden as a bring-your-own-key model.

Protocol: OpenAI Chat Completions
Support: Local models only
Verified: Run against a live warden on 2026-10-04 with grok 1.0.46 (Grok Build), grok-dev 1.1.7. Grok Build: a one-word reply and a read_file tool call, with no xAI login. grok-dev: chat works; its tool calls fail with AI_TypeValidationError.

Local models only, over Chat Completions (api_backend = chat_completions). There is no pass-through to xAI, and a BYOK model needs no xAI login. session_summary keeps Grok’s session-title requests on this model; without it Grok asks this warden for grok-4.6 and gets a 404. Grok adds its own sections to config.toml when it runs. The community grok-cli (npm grok-dev) is a different tool: chat works, tool calls do not.

Requirements

Needs a model with tool calling (agentic edits).
Works best with at least 32,768 tokens of context.

Setup

In the console, Connect writes these files with your warden’s address, your key and the model you picked. Here they are with placeholders.

Grok Build (official)

A model entry in ~/.grok/config.toml; the key comes from LMWARDEN_KEY. Install: curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash, or npm i -g @xai-official/grok

config.toml (~/.grok/config.toml)

[model.lmwarden]
model = "your-served-model-name"
name = "LM Warden · your-served-model-name"
base_url = "https://your-warden/v1"
env_key = "LMWARDEN_KEY"
api_backend = "chat_completions"
context_window = 32768

[models]
default = "lmwarden"
session_summary = "lmwarden"
# The model's context window is unknown: 32768 is a guess. Set it to the model's real window.

Shell

export LMWARDEN_KEY=vw_YOUR_KEY
grok -m lmwarden

Community grok-cli

The community grok-cli reads its base URL, key and model from the env and needs Bun installed. Chat works; tool calls fail, because its xAI SDK rejects tool-call chunks that arrive in parts, as vLLM streams them.

Shell

export GROK_BASE_URL=https://your-warden/v1
export GROK_API_KEY=vw_YOUR_KEY
export GROK_MODEL=your-served-model-name
npx -y grok-dev

Official documentation: https://docs.x.ai/build/settings/reference (read 2026-10-04).