SpaceXAI Releases Grok 4.5, an 'Opus-Class' Model That Undercuts Frontier Pricing by 60%

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SpaceXAI (xAI, now under the SpaceX umbrella) released Grok 4.5 on July 8, with Musk calling it 'roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster' and priced at $2/M input and $6/M output — over 60% below Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. Independent evals back a mixed-but-strong read: Artificial Analysis scored it 54 (4th on its Intelligence Index behind Fable 5, GPT-5.5, and Opus 4.8, +16 points over Grok 4.3), while Snorkel's GDPVal+ gave it a 29% mean pass rate, beating GPT-5.5 (22%) and Opus 4.8 (21%). It was trained alongside Cursor and leads Opus 4.8 on DeepSWE 1.0 and Terminal Bench 2.1 but trails on the neutral DeepSWE 1.1 and SWE-Bench Pro.