SpaceXAI's newest AI model Grok 4.5 dramatically undercuts Anthropic and OpenAI on price

Elon Musk's SpaceXAI Corp. has released a new model called Grok 4.5, in what is its first major launch since it went public a few weeks earlier.

In a blog post earlier today, the company said Grok 4.5 is designed to be a workhorse that's able to tackle all of the usual tasks that the artificial intelligence industry has been automating for some time already. That includes things like coding, writing emails and presentations, performing office and clerical work, doing research and other kinds of knowledge-based work.

None of this sets Grok 4.5 apart, but SpaceXAI said that the difference is that it can do these tasks just as well as its peers at around half the cost, because it has "twice greater token efficiency" than its peers from other frontier model labs. If true, that could be a compelling advantage in a world where the cost of tokens has suddenly become a major issue for heavy AI users.

SpaceXAI announced Grok 4.5's release alongside a host of benchmark results that highlight how competitive it is with the leading models of some of its major competitors, and it falls just short of their performance.

In a post on the social media platform X, which is owned by SpaceXAI, founder Musk compared Grok 4.5 to Anthropic PBC's Opus, which is a large language model designed to handle intensive reasoning tasks.

In a follow up, Musk added that the company's internal assessments show that Grok 4.5 is "roughly comparable" with Opus 4.7 in terms of its performance, but much faster at generating its results. "The combination of capability, faster speed and lower cost is what makes it competitive," he added.

Grok 4.5's real calling card, however, appears to be its overall efficiency. The company said it costs around $2 per one million input tokens and $6 per one million output tokens, which makes it far cheaper than its rival's most capable models. In contrast, Opus 4.7 and 4.8 run at $5 per one million input tokens and $25 for one million outputs. Meanwhile, Fable 5, which is Anthropic's best model, costs $10 for inputs and $50 for outputs, based on one million tokens.

OpenAI Group PBC, meanwhile, has a tiered pricing structure for different models. Its newest model, GPT-5.6 Sol, is priced at $5 for one million inputs and $30 for one million outputs, while Luna, its low cost version, costs $1 for one million inputs and $6 for one million outputs.

This week is proving to be a big one in terms of new AI model launches. Earlier today, OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-5.6 Sol, its most powerful model so far, after being held up by the White House administration due to security concerns. According to OpenAI, GPT-5.6 Sol is its "strongest model yet," but those security concerns mean that it's currently only available to a limited number of customers.

OpenAI also announced the launch of GPT-Live today, which is a family of AI models optimized to process spoken instructions.