SpaceXAI Launches Grok 4.5, Undercuts Rivals on Price With $2 per Million Input Tokens

SpaceXAI released Grok 4.5 on July 8, 2026, its first model since the company went public and acquired AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock. The model is designed for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, and is available through Grok Build, Cursor, and the SpaceXAI console.

Grok 4.5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. That is 80 percent cheaper than Anthropic's Fable 5, which charges $10 input and $50 output per million tokens, and 60 percent cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-5.5 at $5 input and $30 output per million tokens.

Benchmark performance shows mixed results

On Terminal Bench 2.1, which tests complex command-line tasks, Grok 4.5 scored 83.3 percent, nearly matching GPT-5.5 at 83.4 percent and trailing Fable 5 at 84.3 percent by just one point. But on DeepSWE 1.1, which measures the ability to resolve real GitHub issues, Grok 4.5 hit 53 percent, well behind GPT-5.5 at 67 percent and Fable 5 at 70 percent. On SWE Bench Pro, a curated set of harder software engineering problems, it scored 64.7 percent, beating Opus 4.8 in some configurations but falling short of Fable 5's 80.4 percent.

• Grok 4.5 uses 4.2 times fewer tokens than Opus 4.8 on SWE Bench Pro tasks, according to xAI.
• The model delivers results at 80 tokens per second.
• Training relied on tens of thousands of Nvidia GB300 GPUs with heavy data filtering and deduplication.
• The reinforcement learning stage covered hundreds of thousands of tasks, mostly from software engineering, with automated scoring.
• Plugins are live for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Pricing strategy echoes Chinese AI vendors

The pricing approach mirrors what Chinese companies like Zhipu and DeepSeek have done: get close enough on performance, then win on price. Lower per-token pricing and fewer tokens per task make Grok 4.5 by far the cheapest option in this performance tier, assuming the gains hold up in practice. The model is not available in the European Union yet, with SpaceXAI targeting a mid-July launch. Elon Musk described Grok 4.5 as an "Opus-class" model aimed squarely at coding and agentic work, not casual chat. The release marks SpaceXAI's first joint model with Cursor since the acquisition closed in mid-June.