Grok 4.6 vs Claude Opus 5

Grok 4.6 vs Claude Opus 5: Quick Verdict

Claude Opus 5 is the stronger overall model, while Grok 4.6 offers better price-to-performance and is highly competitive for coding and agentic workloads.

Artificial Analysis currently gives Claude Opus 5 an Intelligence Index score of 63, compared with 61 for Grok 4.6. But the gap becomes far less clear in coding: on CursorBench 3.2, Grok 4.6 Extra High scores 70.8%, compared with 70.0% for Opus 5 Max, while costing substantially less per evaluated task.

So the practical answer is:

• Best overall intelligence: Claude Opus 5
• Best value: Grok 4.6
• Best for very difficult reasoning: Claude Opus 5
• Best price-to-performance for coding: Grok 4.6
• Best for professional agentic work: Claude Opus 5
• Best for high-volume AI agents: Grok 4.6
• Largest context window: Claude Opus 5

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 at a Glance

Grok's standard pricing changes once a prompt reaches 200K tokens, while Opus 5 keeps standard pricing throughout its full 1M-token context window.

What Is Grok 4.6?

Grok 4.6 is SpaceXAI's frontier model released on August 12, 2026, with a particular focus on long-running agents, coding, knowledge work, and interactive or visual projects.

The model was trained using additional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning across areas including general coding, STEM, knowledge work, web development, kernel optimization, and computer-aided design. SpaceXAI says Grok 4.6 also shows stronger self-testing and verification during longer workflows.

Its API supports:

• 500,000-token context
• text and image input
• reasoning levels from low to xhigh
• function calling
• web search
• X search
• code execution

Grok 4.6 starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.

What Is Claude Opus 5?

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's latest Opus-class model, released on July 24, 2026.

Anthropic designed it for complex coding, professional knowledge work, long-running agents, research, computer use, and tasks requiring careful verification. It also introduced stronger adaptive reasoning and can vary how much reasoning compute it uses depending on the task.

Claude Opus 5 provides:

• 1M-token context window
• up to 128K output tokens
• text and image input
• adaptive reasoning
• tool use
• long-horizon agent capabilities
• Fast mode through Anthropic's API

Its standard API price is $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 Benchmarks

There is no single benchmark capable of declaring a universal winner.

Different evaluations measure different abilities, and the results between Grok 4.6 and Opus 5 illustrate why looking at one number can be misleading.

Overall Intelligence

Artificial Analysis currently scores:

The Intelligence Index combines multiple evaluations covering reasoning, coding, science, professional work, and other capabilities. On this broader measure, Claude Opus 5 wins.

A two-point difference, however, does not mean Opus wins every individual workload.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 for Coding

Coding is where the comparison gets much closer.

CursorBench 3.2 evaluates agents on ambiguous, multi-file tasks derived from real Cursor sessions.

At the strongest tested configurations:

That is a meaningful result.

Grok 4.6 Extra High completed the benchmark with a slightly higher score while costing roughly one-third as much per task as Opus 5 Max.

But the 0.8 percentage-point score difference should not be treated as proof that Grok is universally better at coding. Cursor explicitly notes that small differences can fall within benchmark variance.

Coding winner

Grok 4.6 wins on coding price-to-performance.

Claude Opus 5 remains a strong choice for complex debugging, architecture, root-cause analysis, and tasks where deeper reasoning matters more than cost.

Anthropic specifically reports improvements in Opus 5's ability to identify root causes, verify its own implementations, and continue working across complex software projects.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 for AI Agents

Both models are designed for more than simple chatbot prompts.

Grok 4.6 was trained heavily around long-running agent environments. SpaceXAI highlights workflows where the model researches unfamiliar topics, works through codebases, builds applications, tests its own work, and continues refining outputs over multiple steps.

Opus 5 goes even further toward long-horizon professional work.

On Artificial Analysis' GDPval-AA v2, which evaluates real-world professional tasks across dozens of occupations, Claude Opus 5 Max currently scores 1849 Elo, compared with 1749 for Grok 4.6 High.

That gives Opus 5 a meaningful advantage for difficult professional agent work.

However, Grok has an efficiency advantage. Artificial Analysis reports that Grok 4.6 completes its long-horizon AA-Briefcase tasks using substantially fewer turns and fewer input tokens than Claude Opus 5 Max.

Agent winner

Choose Opus 5 for maximum agent capability.

Choose Grok 4.6 when you need to run agents repeatedly at scale.

An agent making hundreds or thousands of model calls turns small pricing differences into very large infrastructure bills.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 for Reasoning

Claude Opus 5 has the advantage in difficult reasoning.

Artificial Analysis places Opus 5 above Grok 4.6 on its overall Intelligence Index. Anthropic also reports particularly strong Opus 5 results across novel problem solving, professional knowledge work, scientific analysis, and computer-use evaluations.

Opus 5's adaptive reasoning system also lets the model dynamically decide how much reasoning is required while developers can control its effort level.

Grok 4.6 remains firmly in the frontier tier, but if a task is extremely difficult and inference cost is secondary, Opus 5 is currently the safer choice.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 for Research and Knowledge Work

This category favors Claude Opus 5 for maximum quality but becomes closer when cost is considered.

Anthropic positions Opus 5 heavily around professional research, scientific work, finance, document analysis, and difficult multi-step knowledge tasks. Its strongest improvements are particularly visible when a task requires verification rather than simply producing a plausible first answer.

Grok 4.6 also performs strongly on agentic knowledge work. Artificial Analysis places it among the frontier models on GDPval-AA and reports Fable-tier results on its private AA-Briefcase long-horizon knowledge-work evaluation, although the Opus 5 family remains ahead.

For one difficult research project: Opus 5.

For thousands of research jobs or automated research agents: Grok 4.6 becomes much more attractive.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 Context Window

Claude Opus 5 has twice the context capacity.

• Grok 4.6: 500,000 tokens
• Claude Opus 5: 1,000,000 tokens

That makes Opus 5 better suited to workloads involving:

• massive codebases
• large document collections
• legal archives
• financial reports
• long research histories
• persistent agent memory
• extremely long conversations

But there is an important pricing detail.

Grok 4.6 requests reaching 200K prompt tokens move to $4 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens for the entire request.

Claude Opus 5 provides its full 1M context at its normal $5/$25 standard rates.

So Grok remains cheaper beyond 200K tokens, but its price advantage becomes smaller.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 Pricing

This is Grok 4.6's clearest advantage.

Standard API Pricing

At standard rates, Grok is 60% cheaper for input tokens and 76% cheaper for output tokens.

Consider a workload using:

• 10 million input tokens
• 2 million output tokens

Grok would cost $68 less, or roughly 68% less overall for that token mix.

For individual prompts this may not matter much.

For an AI product processing hundreds of millions of tokens every month, it matters enormously.

What About Fast Mode?

Both models also have faster premium variants.

SpaceXAI offers a faster Grok 4.6 variant at approximately twice the standard price.

Anthropic offers Opus 5 Fast mode at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens and says it runs around 2.5× faster than standard Opus 5.

Fast modes are useful when latency matters more than inference cost, such as interactive coding assistants and user-facing AI applications.

Which Model Is Faster?

Independent Artificial Analysis testing currently favors Grok 4.6 for output generation speed, while Opus 5 can begin responding sooner in the tested configurations.

That distinction matters:

• Time to first token measures how quickly a response begins.
• Output speed measures how quickly tokens arrive once generation has started.

In Artificial Analysis' current comparison, Grok leads on output throughput while Opus leads on time to first token.

For long generations, Grok's higher throughput can matter more.

For short interactive conversations, initial latency may be more noticeable.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 for Vision and Frontend Work

Both models support image input.

Grok 4.6 places particular emphasis on visual and interactive application development. SpaceXAI says the model produces stronger first versions of interactive projects and can continue refining visual applications through multiple rounds of feedback.

Anthropic also reports major improvements to Opus 5's visual reasoning, frontend implementation, diagrams, charts, and its ability to inspect and verify its own visual work.

There is not enough independent head-to-head evidence yet to declare a reliable universal winner for vision.

For frontend coding specifically, Grok's strong CursorBench performance and much lower cost make it especially interesting.

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5: Which Should You Choose?

Grok 4.6 vs Opus 5 by Use Case

Final Verdict: Grok 4.6 or Claude Opus 5?

Frequently Asked Questions