The xAI Python SDK provides a gRPC-based interface for interacting with xAI's APIs, enabling developers to easily integrate text generation, image processing, and structured output capabilities into their Python applications. It offers both synchronous and asynchronous clients, aiming for an intuitive and robust developer experience for tasks ranging from simple text generation to complex agentic tool use.

How It Works

The SDK leverages gRPC for efficient communication with xAI's backend services. It provides distinct Client and AsyncClient classes, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous programming paradigms. Key functionalities are exposed through methods for chat, image generation/understanding, function calling, and structured data output, abstracting the underlying API complexities and offering features like real-time streaming and agentic tool execution.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Installation: pip install xai-sdk or uv add xai-sdk.
• Prerequisites: Python 3.10 or higher. An XAI_API_KEY environment variable or explicit key is required for authentication.
• Documentation: Comprehensive guides are available at docs.x.ai.

Highlighted Details

• Supports both synchronous and asynchronous clients for flexible integration.
• Enables multi-turn chat with conversation history management and real-time response streaming.
• Facilitates image understanding by interleaving images and text in prompts.
• Offers advanced features including function calling, structured outputs (Pydantic models), agentic tool calling (web search, X, code execution), and deferred chat.
• Includes comprehensive OpenTelemetry integration for tracing and observability, with options for console or OTLP export.

Maintenance & Community

The provided README does not detail specific contributors, sponsorships, or community channels (e.g., Discord, Slack). Information on contributing can be found in the official documentation.

Licensing & Compatibility

The xAI SDK is distributed under the Apache-2.0 License. This license is permissive and generally compatible with commercial use and closed-source linking.

Limitations & Caveats

Authentication requires an XAI_API_KEY. API requests have a default timeout of 15 minutes (900 seconds), which is configurable per client instance. While the SDK abstracts underlying gRPC objects, direct access to proto objects is possible for advanced use cases. Error handling is based on gRPC status codes.