Xai's grok 4.5 is a 1.5-trillion-parameter moe built for agent work, 500k context, shipping at in…
xai's grok 4.5 is a 1.5-trillion-parameter moe built for agent work, 500k context, shipping at in and out per million tokens while claiming opus-class tool-use. the price war moved up a tier — frontier-class coding for commodity prices.
model quality and model price just decoupled for good.
Context
xAI's launch post of 16 July 2026 says Grok 4.5 is priced at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 6 dollars per million output tokens, built for coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work, trained alongside Cursor, with vendor benchmark charts. The xAI docs list a 500,000 token context window, with 2.00 and 6.00 dollars for prompts under 200k tokens and 4.00 and 12.00 dollars at or above 200k, cached input 0.30 and 0.60.
The published note text has its price figures missing on the site and they were not reconstructed, so the launch price here comes from the first-party post and the docs, not from the note. The docs page is current as read, not a launch-date record. The 500k context and the launch price are first-party. The 1.5 trillion parameter MoE claim rests on a model-card snippet and a third-party page, and the first-party launch text gave no parameter count, so it is unverified. Opus-class tool-use is not a first-party claim in the text read. Benchmarks are vendor-chosen. Quality and price decoupled for good is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Grok 4.5 model card ↗Snippet only.
- Grok 4.5 on armes.ai ↗Third party, snippet only.
Watch next
- First-party parameter count, if published.
Sources
- Grok 4.5 (xAI, 16 Jul 2026)x.ai
- Grok 4.5 model docs (xAI)docs.x.ai
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 14:01 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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