# Grok 4.5 Uses 4.2x Fewer Tokens and Costs 17x Less Than Opus 4.8

> Source: <https://pub.towardsai.net/grok-4-5-uses-4-2x-fewer-tokens-and-costs-17x-less-than-opus-4-8-6211d38806a2?source=rss----98111c9905da---4>
> Published: 2026-07-12 20:01:00+00:00

Member-only story

# Grok 4.5 Uses 4.2x Fewer Tokens and Costs 17x Less Than Opus 4.8

Grok 4.5 is the fourth-smartest model in the world, and that is not the interesting number. On Artificial Analysis’s independent [Intelligence Index](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-4-5) it scores 54 and lands fourth, behind Fable 5, GPT-5.5, and Claude Opus 4.8. It wins exactly two of the four benchmarks SpaceXAI chose to publish about it. By the usual way we rank these things, it is a very good model that is not the best at anything.

Here is the number that matters. On SWE-Bench Pro, xAI reports Grok 4.5 resolves a task using an average of **15,954 output tokens**. Opus 4.8, on the same benchmark at its maximum setting, burns **67,020**. That is 4.2 times fewer tokens for a task both models can solve. Now put the price beside it: Grok 4.5 charges $6 per million output tokens, Opus 4.8 charges $25. Multiply it out and the same solved task costs about $0.096 of output on Grok and $1.68 on Opus. Seventeen times cheaper. Not because Grok is smarter. Because it shuts up sooner.

That is the whole story of the model that SpaceXAI and Cursor shipped on 8 July 2026, and it is a story about economics, not leaderboards.

## Key takeaways

**Grok 4.5** launched 8 July 2026, the first model co-trained by SpaceXAI (the merged SpaceX and xAI) and Cursor after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent…