Grok 4.6 wins on price ($2 vs $5/1M input). Claude Opus 5 wins on coding (100 vs 86) and writing quality and context window (1M vs 500K). For most workflows, Claude Opus 5 is the stronger default — best premium model for agentic coding — near-fable 5 quality at half the price.
The shortest way to see the safest default, the lower-cost option, and the specialist pick before you read deeper.
Claude Opus 5 is the safest overall answer here when you want the strongest default instead of the lowest list price.
Mistral: Mistral Nemo is the lower-cost option to start with when you still need useful output at scale.
Grok 4.6 is the better pick when response speed matters more than maximum reasoning depth.
Claude Opus 5 leads on coding with a score of 100 vs 86 for Grok 4.6.
Claude Opus 5 has the larger context window: 1M vs 500K for Grok 4.6.
Grok 4.6 is cheaper at $2/1M input tokens vs $5/1M for Claude Opus 5.
Choose Claude Opus 5 for complex agentic coding and enterprise agent workflows. Its coding and research scores are what carry the recommendation here.
Choose Grok 4.6 when your work is mostly long-running agents and multi-step codebase work — that is the workload it was tuned for.
Grok 4.6 is the more cost-efficient option at $2/1M input — Claude Opus 5 costs 3x more per input token, so the gap is worth taking seriously wherever token volume rather than peak quality drives the bill.
Switch the scoring lens to see whether the top answer changes when you care more about cost, speed, or long-document work.
Anthropic / Premium / Aug 6, 2026
Best premium model for agentic coding — near-Fable 5 quality at half the price.
Ranks models by the broadest mix of coding, writing, research, and long-context usefulness.
You need fast interactive latency (Sonnet 5 is quicker and one-fifth the price) or absolute frontier ceiling (Fable 5).
The fastest way to see where the recommendation shifts when your priority changes.
Finishes agent tasks in half the turns — cheap where it counts.
Best premium model for agentic coding — near-Fable 5 quality at half the price.
Every figure below is the provider's list price or a published capability score — the same numbers the recommendation on this page is built from.
| Model | Input | Output | Est. month | Context | Speed | Coding | Writing | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5Anthropic | $5.00/1M | $25.00/1M | $100 | 1M tokens | Deliberate | 100 | 96 | 98 |
| Grok 4.6xAI | $2.00/1M | $6.00/1M | $32 | 500k tokens | Fast | 86 | 84 | 88 |
Capability scores are out of 100 and reflect our own weighting of published benchmarks and production signals — see how we evaluate models. “Est. month” assumes 10M input and 2M output tokens at list price, with no batch or caching discounts applied, so treat it as a ceiling.
What each one is genuinely good at, where it falls down, and the situations we would steer you away from it — not just the headline score.
Anthropic's flagship-tier Opus that comes close to Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price — the new default for complex agentic coding and enterprise agents.
You need fast interactive latency (Sonnet 5 is quicker and one-fifth the price) or absolute frontier ceiling (Fable 5).
The new premium coding default. Opus 5 takes the SWE-bench Verified lead from Opus 4.8 at the same $5/$25 price, and gets within half a point of Fable 5 on agentic coding at half the cost. Choose Fable 5 only when absolute frontier intelligence matters more than budget.
Released July 24, 2026 at Opus 4.8's exact pricing. 1M context at standard rates, 128K max output. Anthropic's alignment audit calls it their most aligned model to date. Default model on Claude Max plans.
xAI's long-horizon agent model — it finishes agentic tasks in roughly half the turns of its rivals, which makes it cheaper in practice than its per-token price suggests.
You need a published SWE-bench score to justify the pick, or your prompts routinely cross 200K tokens where the price doubles.
Buy it for turn efficiency, not for benchmark ceilings. On long agent runs, finishing in half the turns beats a model that scores two points higher and takes twice as many round trips.
Released August 12, 2026, succeeding Grok 4.5. Long-context billing is a cliff, not a ramp: at 200K tokens and above the whole request is charged at $4/$12. DeepSWE 65.9%, CursorBench 3.2 70.8%, FrontierCode 1.1 Extended 61.3%, Terminal-Bench 3.0 26.5%, APEX-Agents 57.5%.
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Claude Opus 5 wins on more of the categories we score — coding, research, reasoning — so it is the better default of the two. Grok 4.6 is the better pick when your work is mostly long-running agents and multi-step codebase work. Neither is universally "better": Claude Opus 5 is aimed at complex agentic coding and enterprise agent workflows, Grok 4.6 at long-running agents and multi-step codebase work.
Grok 4.6 is cheaper at $2/1M input and $6/1M output. Claude Opus 5 costs $5/1M input and $25/1M output.
Claude Opus 5 has the larger context window at 1M tokens vs Grok 4.6's 500K. For large document analysis, Claude Opus 5 is the stronger pick.
Claude Opus 5 is better for coding with a score of 100 vs Grok 4.6's 86 (out of 100). Claude Fable 5 is the overall coding leader in this directory at 100/100.
Grok 4.6 is faster with a fast speed rating (score: 4) vs Claude Opus 5's deliberate rating (score: 2). Speed matters most for interactive and high-throughput work; for batch jobs the Claude Opus 5 latency penalty is usually invisible.
Still short of Claude Fable 5's absolute frontier ceiling on the hardest long-running agent tasks. Fast mode (research preview) doubles pricing to $10/$50, erasing the cost advantage over Fable 5. Avoid it if you need fast interactive latency (Sonnet 5 is quicker and one-fifth the price) or absolute frontier ceiling (Fable 5). That is the main case for looking at Grok 4.6 instead.
No published SWE-bench Verified or SWE-bench Pro figure, so it cannot be compared directly on the standard coding leaderboard. GPT-5.6 Sol Max beats it on DeepSWE v1.1 and Terminal-Bench 3.0. Prompts of 200K tokens or more are billed at $4/$12 across the entire request, not just the overage. Avoid it if you need a published SWE-bench score to justify the pick, or your prompts routinely cross 200K tokens where the price doubles. Against Claude Opus 5 specifically, the gap shows up most on coding (100 vs 86).
Take a moderate workload of 10M input and 2M output tokens a month. Grok 4.6 runs $32.00 (at $2/1M in and $6/1M out); Claude Opus 5 runs $100.00 (at $5/1M in and $25/1M out). That is a $68.00/month difference — Grok 4.6 is the cheaper of the two at this volume, and the gap scales linearly as you send more. Output tokens dominate the bill on both, so prompt length matters far less than response length.
Yes, and for most teams that beats picking one. A common split is Claude Opus 5 for complex agentic coding and enterprise agent workflows, with Grok 4.6 handling long-running agents and multi-step codebase work. Routing high-volume, low-stakes calls to Grok 4.6 at $2/1M and reserving Claude Opus 5 for the hard cases is usually the cheapest arrangement that does not cost you quality.