75% SWE-bench score — strong coding performance close to top Claude models
2M token context window at $2/$6 per million tokens
Fast and responsive for exploration and open-ended research loops
Weaknesses
Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 lead on pure coding benchmarks
Less established ecosystem and tooling than OpenAI or Anthropic
Real-world use cases
What people actually use Grok 4 for.
Early-stage research mapping — exploring a new topic before narrowing down
Analyzing large codebases or datasets within a 2M-token context window
Competitive intelligence and market research with broad, fast synthesis
How Grok 4 compares
The nearest models people weigh against it, and what actually separates them.
vs Grok 4.5 — Against Grok 4.5 (xAI), Grok 4 lands within a few percent on price and takes 4x the context. Which one wins depends on whether context depth or latency is your constraint.
vs Grok 4.6 — Against Grok 4.6 (xAI), Grok 4 lands within a few percent on price and takes 4x the context. Which one wins depends on whether context depth or latency is your constraint.
vs GPT-6 Astra — Against GPT-6 Astra (OpenAI), Grok 4 runs about 87% cheaper per token, takes 1.9x the context and answers faster. Take Grok 4 unless you specifically need what GPT-6 Astra does better.
Price History
Grok 4 pricing over time
→0% since May 8
46 data points · tracked daily since May 8, 2026
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Start using Grok 4
Coding and research at competitive pricing with maximum context. Start free — no card required.
xAI's first coding- and agent-focused model — the first full-scale deployment of the 1.5T-parameter V9 MoE base, trained with real developer-session data from Cursor.
Verdict
Best cost-per-solved-task coding agent — efficiency over ceiling.
Quality score
83%
Pricing
$2.00/1M in
$6.00/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
500k tokens
Released July 8, 2026 on the 1.5T-parameter V9 base. Pricing verified on docs.x.ai: $2/$6 under 200K prompt tokens, $4/$12 above. Full access initially gated to SuperGrok Heavy; staged rollout to SuperGrok $30 tier. EU availability lagged launch.
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.
Verdict
Finishes agent tasks in half the turns — cheap where it counts.
Quality score
84%
Pricing
$2.00/1M in
$6.00/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
500k tokens
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%.
OpenAI's September 3, 2026 frontier release — the first GPT-6 model and OpenAI's answer to Claude Fable 5.1 two days earlier. State of the art on computer use (OSWorld 2.0 72.6% in ~47% less time than GPT-5.6 Sol), agentic coding (Terminal-Bench 4.0 57.9%), and frontier math (FrontierMath Tier 4 97.6%). $10/$50 per 1M tokens, 1.05M context, 128K output, knowledge cutoff April 30, 2026.
Verdict
OpenAI's frontier answer to Fable 5.1 — computer-use and agentic-coding leader at $10/$50.
Quality score
99%
Pricing
$10.00/1M in
$50.00/1M out
Speed
Deliberate
2/5 speed
Context
1.1M tokens
Released September 3, 2026. API ID gpt-6-astra; rolling out over the coming days to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise (usage inside existing allowances; GPT-6 Astra Pro for Pro/Business/Enterprise; Enterprise off by default), the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Bedrock. Standard API pricing $10/$50 per 1M tokens; Fast mode is up to 2x speed at 2x price; cache reads and writes have separate rates. Model docs list 1,050,000 context, 128,000 max output, knowledge cutoff April 30, 2026, reasoning efforts up to 'max'. Published launch numbers (Astra / GPT-5.6 Sol / Fable 5.1 / Opus 5): OSWorld 2.0 72.6 / 65.7 / — / 70.2; Terminal-Bench 4.0 57.9 / 37.3 / 55.8 / 52.3; Terminal-Bench Science 0.1 64.6 / 22.4 / 52.6 / 30.0; FrontierMath Tier 4 v2 97.6 / 83.0 / 87.8 / 73.2; GPQA Diamond 96.0 / 94.6 / 93.7 / 93.7; Humanity's Last Exam w/ tools 57.2 / — / 65.0 / 63.6; AutomationBench 41.4 / 18.1 / 31.4 / 26.9; DeepSWE v1.1 74.1 / 72.7 / 67.4 / 73.7; ARC-AGI-2 95.0 / 92.5 / 90.0 / 90.4; ARC-AGI-3 99.9 (OpenAI responses-API harness; ARC Prize's stateless runs score far lower) / 7.8 / — / 30.2; ExploitBench 100.0 / 78.5 / — / 70; SRE-Bench 88.0 / 55.9; Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1 61.2 / 60.9 / 65.7 / 63.1. Meets the Critical threshold for cybersecurity under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework; advanced cyber workflows gated behind OpenAI Daybreak. All figures from OpenAI's launch post and model docs, verified September 4, 2026.
Computer use leaderFrontierAgenticReasoningLong contextPremiumNew
Best for
Computer and browser use, long-horizon agentic coding, and frontier math and science work
Grok 4 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on the API. A month of 10M input and 2M output tokens runs about $32.00 at list price, before any batch or caching discounts.
What is Grok 4 best for?
Grok 4 is best for coding and research at competitive pricing with maximum context. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around balanced pricing and fast speed.
When should I avoid Grok 4?
You need the highest writing quality or the most reliable production-grade output — Claude wins both.
What is a cheaper alternative to Grok 4?
Grok 4.5 (xAI) at $2.00/1M/1M input against Grok 4's $2.00/1M/1M. Best cost-per-solved-task coding agent — efficiency over ceiling. Compare it first if Grok 4's pricing is the thing stopping you.
What is a faster alternative to Grok 4?
Grok 4.6 — fast against Grok 4's fast, with 500k tokens of context. Worth the swap when response time is what your users notice rather than the last few points of reasoning depth.
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