# Grok 4.5 released as token-efficient coding and knowledge work model

> xAI's Grok 4.5 is pitched less on being the smartest model and more on being the leanest. The company says it is roughly comparable to Opus 4.7 on coding, agents and knowledge work, but resolves the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark using about 4.2 times fewer output tokens than Opus 4.8, at pricing of $2 per million input and $6 output. Token efficiency is an underrated axis. Because you pay per token and long agentic runs generate huge volumes of them, a model that reaches the same answer with far fewer tokens can be dramatically cheaper in practice even at a similar sticker price. Grok 4.5 also exposes configurable reasoning effort, low, medium or high, so developers can dial the compute spend up or down per task. It slots into the same story as OpenAI's tiered GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's cheaper Sonnet: the frontier labs have largely stopped competing on who has the biggest brain and started competing on cost per unit of useful work. Grok 4.5 is available in xAI's own tools and inside Cursor on all plans, putting the efficiency claim in front of a lot of working developers.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: xAI · Published Saturday, July 18, 2026_

## Wortins' read

xAI's Grok 4.5 is pitched less on being the smartest model and more on being the leanest. The company says it is roughly comparable to Opus 4.7 on coding, agents and knowledge work, but resolves the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark using about 4.2 times fewer output tokens than Opus 4.8, at pricing of $2 per million input and $6 output. Token efficiency is an underrated axis. Because you pay per token and long agentic runs generate huge volumes of them, a model that reaches the same answer with far fewer tokens can be dramatically cheaper in practice even at a similar sticker price. Grok 4.5 also exposes configurable reasoning effort, low, medium or high, so developers can dial the compute spend up or down per task. It slots into the same story as OpenAI's tiered GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's cheaper Sonnet: the frontier labs have largely stopped competing on who has the biggest brain and started competing on cost per unit of useful work. Grok 4.5 is available in xAI's own tools and inside Cursor on all plans, putting the efficiency claim in front of a lot of working developers.

## Source

[Read the full story at xAI](https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5)

## Related coverage

- [Top AI spenders cut per-employee costs by nearly 10 percent in August](https://www.wortins.com/story/top-ai-spenders-cut-per-employee-costs-by-nearly-10-percent--b31ffb0b) — [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com/top-ai-spenders-cut-per-employee-costs-by-nearly-10-percent-in-august/)
- [A look at why the oft-discussed predictions that AI will deliver double-digit GDP growth in advanced economies are extremely unlikely over the next 10-15 years (Ghosts of Electricity)](https://www.wortins.com/story/a-look-at-why-the-oft-discussed-predictions-that-ai-will-del-6241fa38) — [Techmeme](https://www.techmeme.com/260910/p10#a260910p10)
- [Farmers Embrace AI More Than Any Other Tech, McKinsey Says](https://www.wortins.com/story/farmers-embrace-ai-more-than-any-other-tech-mckinsey-says-78dfb3ec) — [Insurance Journal](https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/09/09/884469.htm)
- [Microsoft has new AI privacy rules for schools](https://www.wortins.com/story/microsoft-has-new-ai-privacy-rules-for-schools-6e0b8ab0) — [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/policy/992359/microsoft-aft-schools-ai-privacy)
- [Chinese tech giants are hiring skilled professionals as specialized AI trainers to build high-quality datasets, mirroring efforts by US platforms like Mercor (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)](https://www.wortins.com/story/chinese-tech-giants-are-hiring-skilled-professionals-as-spec-116fb4b8) — [Techmeme](https://www.techmeme.com/260910/p6#a260910p6)
- [Researchers used AI to build a WeChat worm that spreads through phone calls](https://www.wortins.com/story/researchers-used-ai-to-build-a-wechat-worm-that-spreads-thro-8bf3f469) — [The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/wechat-worm-ai-calif-tencent-zero-click)

---

_Curated and written by [Wortins](https://www.wortins.com) — The daily AI briefing. Every story links to its original source; the "Wortins read" on each is our own original analysis. [About Wortins & our editorial approach](https://www.wortins.com/about)._