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

SpaceXAI and Cursor released Grok 4.5 on July 8, 2026, which uses 4.2 times fewer tokens and costs 17 times less than Claude Opus 4.8 on SWE-Bench Pro, solving tasks for $0.096 versus $1.68. The model ranks fourth on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index but is notable for its economic efficiency rather than raw performance.

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…