xAI's newly released Grok 4.5 completes each Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task for roughly $0.31 — nearly 89% cheaper than Anthropic's top-scoring Claude Fable 5 — reframing the current frontier-model race around cost efficiency rather than raw benchmark supremacy.
July 8, 2026 · xAI
Grok 4.5 Bets on Price, Not the Podium
xAI's new model finishes each Intelligence Index task for about $0.31 — nearly 89% cheaper than the top-scoring Claude Fable 5 — reframing the frontier race around cost efficiency rather than raw benchmark supremacy.
Cost per Intelligence Index task
Same battery of tasks — dramatically different bills.
Grok 4.5 costs nearly 9× less than Fable 5 for the same work.
54
Intelligence Index score — 4th overall , trailing Fable 5 (60), GPT-5.6 Sol (~59) & Opus 4.8 (56)
89%
cheaper per task than the top-scoring Claude Fable 5
+16
point jump over Grok 4.3 in one iteration
Token efficiency vs Opus 4.8
Fewer output tokens to complete comparable work — the engine behind the low price.
Opus 4.8 output tokens 100%
Grok 4.5 output tokens <40%
Over 60% fewer output tokens in some evaluations · sustained speed above 71 tok/s , peaking near 97 · $2 in / $6 out per million tokens · 500K context.
The value case
A strong pick for agentic and coding workloads: low token consumption makes heavy usage far more affordable, and it approaches Fable 5 on coding-agent benchmarks while costing dramatically less.
The caveats
On raw quality it still lags Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on the hardest coding problems, and the leaner token budget can raise the risk of hallucination.
The emerging playbook
Developers are managing the trade-off, not resolving it — blending models across a workflow:
ARCHITECTURE
Higher-scoring model
→
EXECUTION
Cheaper model (Grok 4.5)
With several labs now clustered near the intelligence ceiling, xAI's bet is that aggressive pricing and token efficiency may prove as decisive as topping the leaderboard.
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