Grok 4.5 vs. Claude Opus 4.8: Costs and what works, not the spec sheet
7 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth 7
novelty 7
actionability 8
community 4
strategic 6
personal 9
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Cost comparison of Grok vs Claude, actionable for AI model selection.
Summary
xAI's Grok 4.5 matches Claude Opus 4.8 on real coding tasks while using 4.2x fewer output tokens and costing less than half per token ($2/$6 vs $5/$25 per million input/output). In a head-to-head Rust bug fix on the `fd` codebase, both models produced identical single-line diffs, but Opus consumed 4.3x more tokens. Terminal-Bench 2.1 scores favor Grok (83.3% vs 78.9%), though Opus still leads on SWE-Bench Pro for real bug fixes.