// head_to_head

Claude Opus 4.5 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6

Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.

OpenRouter + LiveBenchAll comparisonsFull leaderboard

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 leads by 5.5 points overall while listing 3.3× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.1181 per point.

anthropic

Claude Opus 4.5

Blended / 1M
$10.00
Context
200K
Released
Nov 24, 2025
Overall score
72.6
reasoningtool callingfile inputimage inputprompt caching

x-ai

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6

Blended / 1M
$3.00
Context
500K
Released
Aug 12, 2026
Overall score
78.0
reasoningtool callingimage inputfile inputprompt caching

Specs and pricing

MetricClaude Opus 4.5SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6
LiveBench overall

Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better.

72.678.0win
Cost per point

Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability.

$0.3211$0.1181win
Blended price / 1M

3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic.

$10.00$3.00win
Input price / 1M$5.00$2.00win
Output price / 1M$25.00$6.00win
Cached input / 1M

Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one.

$0.500$0.500
Context window200K500Kwin
Max output tokens64K

Benchmarks by category

An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 4.5 on top, SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 below, both out of 100.

Agentic coding
39.7
57.0
Coding
79.7
76.8
Reasoning
80.1
90.5
Mathematics
90.4
92.6
Data analysistoo close to call
74.4
73.9
Language
81.3
83.7
Instruction following
62.5
71.9

What each one costs to run

Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.

WorkloadClaude Opus 4.5SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6
Support chatbot

1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests

$2876.00/mo$852.00/mo
RAG assistant

8K in / 600 out × 100K requests

$3700.00/mo$1360.00/mo
Coding agent

40K in / 4K out × 20K requests

$3480.00/mo$1240.00/mo
Document extraction

20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests

$6650.00/mo$2375.00/mo
Bulk classification

500 in / 20 out × 5M requests

$12,750/mo$4850.00/mo
Run these two through the cost calculator

Which should you pick?

You are running this at volume

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6

Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.1181 per point — the gap compounds with every request.

Quality matters more than the bill

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6

Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 78.0.

The workload is coding or agentic work

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6

Leads on agentic coding — 57.0 against 39.7.

You need to fit large documents in one call

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6

Wider context window — 500K against 200K.

Claude Opus 4.5 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 FAQ

Which is better, Claude Opus 4.5 or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6?

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 leads by 5.5 points overall while listing 3.3× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.1181 per point.

Is Claude Opus 4.5 cheaper than SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6?

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 4.5 lists at $10.00 per million tokens and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 at $3.00 — SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 is 3.3× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 4.5 charges $5.00 in and $25.00 out, SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 charges $2.00 and $6.00 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.

Claude Opus 4.5 vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6: which scores higher on benchmarks?

Claude Opus 4.5 scores 72.6 and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 scores 78.0 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 5.5-point lead for SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.

Which gives better value for money, Claude Opus 4.5 or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6?

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Claude Opus 4.5 works out at $0.3211 per point and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 at $0.1181.

Does Claude Opus 4.5 or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 have a bigger context window?

SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 has the larger context window: 200K for Claude Opus 4.5 against 500K for SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.

Do Claude Opus 4.5 and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 support prompt caching?

Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.500 per million for Claude Opus 4.5 and $0.500 for SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6, against full input rates of $5.00 and $2.00. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.

Related comparisons

How these numbers are produced

  • Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
  • ScoresLiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
  • Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
  • “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.

Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.