GROK 4.5

Grok 4.5: xAI's flagship with live X search

Released July 8, 2026. GPQA 93.1, 99th-percentile intelligence. 500K context, vision and tools, native X/web/news live search. $2/$6 per million tokens.

Try Grok 4.5 on Council See it in a council

Grok 4.5 is xAI's flagship model, released July 8, 2026. Its benchmark profile is genuinely frontier — 93.1 on GPQA and 99th-percentile intelligence ratings — and its structural advantage is unchanged: native live search across X, the web, and news gives it access to real-time social data no other lab's search stack reaches. It ships a 500K-token context window, vision input, and tool support, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output — aggressive for a flagship; the cheapest premium-tier model in Council's lineup by output price. Versus its predecessor Grok 4.3 ($1.25/$2.50, released April 30, 2026), Grok 4.5 raises the reasoning ceiling substantially but costs more per token and, notably, halves the context window from 1M to 500K — if you need the bigger window, 4.3 and the 2M-context Grok 4.20 stay in the lineup. The case for Grok 4.5: current-events research, market and social-sentiment work, and strong reasoning at a mid-tier price. The case against: whole-repo coding (500K may not fit; Claude and Gemini go to 1M) and refactor quality, where the Claude line leads.

Specs

ProviderxAI
ReleasedJuly 8, 2026
Context window500,000 tokens
GPQA93.1
Intelligence rating99th percentile
Vision / toolsText + image input; tool calling
Web searchNative live search: X + web + news
Price (in / out per 1M)$2.00 / $6.00

Best at

Where it loses

Grok 4.5 vs Grok 4.3: an honest trade

This is not a strict upgrade, and it's worth being precise. Grok 4.5 is the stronger reasoner by a clear margin (GPQA 93.1, 99th-percentile intelligence) — but it costs $2/$6 against 4.3's $1.25/$2.50, and its 500K context window is half of 4.3's 1M. Grok 4.3 (released April 30, 2026) stays in Council's active lineup precisely because of that: if your workload is long-document analysis at volume, 4.3 may still be the better xAI seat. Pick 4.5 for reasoning quality and live-search work; pick 4.3 for context size per dollar; pick Grok 4.20 when you need the full 2M-token window.

How Council AI runs it

Grok 4.5 is available on every paid Council AI plan (Plus, Pro, Ultra) and usually takes the real-time seat in a council: when your question touches anything that happened after other models' training cutoffs, Grok's live X/web/news search grounds the debate in current data. It answers in parallel with models from up to 8 other labs, and the moderator's agreement score makes disagreement useful — when Grok cites something the others missed, you see exactly where the fresh information changed the answer.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Grok 4.5 cost via API?

$2.00 per million input tokens and $6.00 per million output tokens — the cheapest output price of any premium-tier model in Council's lineup. Council AI bundles it into monthly plan budgets.

What is Grok 4.5's context window?

500,000 tokens. Note that's smaller than Grok 4.3's 1M and Grok 4.20's 2M — xAI traded window size for reasoning strength in this release.

Is Grok 4.5 better than Grok 4.3?

At reasoning, clearly — GPQA 93.1 and 99th-percentile intelligence ratings. But 4.3 is cheaper ($1.25/$2.50 vs $2/$6) and has double the context window (1M vs 500K), so 4.3 remains the better pick for long-document volume work.

What makes Grok's web search different?

It's the only frontier model with native live search across X as well as the web and news. For social sentiment, breaking news, and market chatter, it reaches data other models' search stacks don't index.

Is Grok 4.5 available in Council AI?

Yes — on all paid plans (Plus, Pro, Ultra), running in parallel councils with models from 8 other labs and consensus scoring on every answer.