Grok 4.5 Explained: Retired, and Grok 4.7 Has Now Arrived Behind the Paid Modes
Grok 4.5 has been retired. SpaceXAI replaced it with Grok 4.6 across every plan including Free in August 2026, then announced Grok 4.7 on September 21. On grok.com today Grok 4.7 is named behind the paid Expert and Heavy modes only, while the pricing page still ticks Grok 4.6 for all seven plans.
Grok 4.5 is no longer the model you get. SpaceXAI retired it from every consumer Grok plan between August 12 and August 15, 2026 and put Grok 4.6 in its place, ticked for all seven tiers including Free. Re-read on October 2, 2026, neither SpaceXAI's pricing page nor grok.com's mode picker names Grok 4.5 anywhere. What has changed since is the model above it: SpaceXAI announced Grok 4.7 on September 21, 2026, and grok.com's picker now names Grok 4.7 behind the paid Expert and Heavy modes while the pricing page still lists Grok 4.6 for all seven plans. The free default, Fast, names no model on either surface. The rest of this page is the record of Grok 4.5 itself -- the July 8, 2026 launch by SpaceXAI (the company behind Grok, which now brands itself SpaceXAI rather than xAI on its own developer docs), the free-on-every-plan verdict that survived the swap, the prices, SpaceXAI's own benchmarks and the EU timeline -- because those are still the questions people type its name to ask.
Key Takeaways
- Release date: July 8, 2026. Grok 4.5 shipped publicly that day, roughly six weeks after its original late-May target.
- It was free on every plan, and it has since been replaced twice over. SpaceXAI's pricing page listed Grok 4.5 on every consumer plan, Free included, from at least July 13 until August 12, 2026. By August 15 that row read Grok 4.6, still ticked for Free, and on the newest capture we can read (September 28, 2026) it still does.
- Grok 4.7 exists, and it is the first swap that may not be free. SpaceXAI announced it on September 21, 2026. On grok.com today the Expert mode reads "Thinks hard - Grok 4.7" and Heavy reads "Team of Experts - Grok 4.7", and both are marked as requiring an upgrade. The pricing page has no Grok 4.7 row at all.
- "You pay for reasoning depth, not the model" held for two swaps and is now in doubt. Free gets Fast. Auto, Expert and Heavy require a subscription, as does video generation. That was a clean verdict while every mode ran the same model; now that Expert and Heavy name Grok 4.7 and Fast names nothing, the two Grok surfaces no longer agree.
- SpaceXAI publishes three consumer prices: Free at $0, SuperGrok at $30/month and SuperGrok Plus at $100/month, with Lite, Heavy, Business and Enterprise tiers alongside them.
- Developers get it too. It is live on the SpaceXAI API as
grok-4.5, metered at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, and in Cursor on all plans. - February 1, 2026 is the published cut-off, but it now belongs to Grok 4.6. Read on September 9, 2026, SpaceXAI's models page states the cut-off only for Grok 4.6 and no longer states one for Grok 4.5. Live web and X search cover recent events; the model on its own does not.
- Grok 4.5 is retired from the plans but not from the API. SpaceXAI's models page still lists
grok-4.5(aliasesgrok-4.5-latestandgrok-build-latest, 500,000-token limit) at the same $2 and $6 per million tokens as Grok 4.6, read September 9, 2026. - The EU was excluded at launch, and only the API block has lifted. SpaceXAI's launch post said Grok 4.5 was "not yet available in the EU in any SpaceXAI products or the API console"; its changelog reopened the API console on July 17 and has said nothing about the consumer Grok apps.
- SpaceXAI's own benchmarks put it third. Its launch charts show Claude Fable ahead of Grok 4.5 on four of the five evals SpaceXAI chose to publish -- but it is far cheaper and, by its own measure, about 4x more token-efficient.
Grok 4.5 Release Date: When It Actually Shipped
Grok 4.5 was released on July 8, 2026. That is the date SpaceXAI published the model and made it available to developers the same day; it landed in the consumer Grok apps immediately after. The confusion around this date is understandable, because the model was talked about publicly for weeks before anyone could touch it -- and it arrived about six weeks later than originally signalled.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Late May 2026 | Original expected launch window. Missed. |
| June 28, 2026 | Musk confirms Grok 4.5 exists, running in private beta at SpaceX and Tesla only. No public access. |
| July 8, 2026 | Public release. SpaceXAI's announcement says it is available "today in Grok Build, in Cursor on all plans, and from the SpaceXAI console" -- and not in the EU. |
| July 9, 2026 | Rollout reaches the consumer Grok apps. |
| By July 13, 2026 | SpaceXAI's pricing page lists Grok 4.5 as included on every plan, Free included. SpaceXAI never announced this as its own event, so the exact date the free tier flipped is not published -- July 13 is simply the earliest date we can prove it from the page itself. |
| July 17, 2026 | EU access opens on the API console, per SpaceXAI's release notes. |
If you read a page saying Grok 4.5 has "no release date" or that you "cannot use it on any plan," that page is describing the private-beta period that ended on July 8.
Can You Still Use Grok 4.5? Availability by Plan
You can use Grok on every plan, including the free one, and SpaceXAI's two surfaces now name different models. SpaceXAI's pricing page has a plan comparison matrix with a single row under "Models." Until August 12, 2026 that row said Grok 4.5 and was ticked for every tier. Since August 15, 2026 it says Grok 4.6, and on the newest readable capture, September 28, 2026, it still says Grok 4.6 and is still ticked for all seven tiers -- with no Grok 4.7 row, a week after Grok 4.7 was announced. Decoded cell by cell, that capture also marks Video generation as the one row the Free plan does not get, which is the cross that proves the ticks are real. The table below is the plan structure, which did not change; only the model name in the first column did. What differs between plans is how hard Grok is allowed to think, whether it can make video, and how much you can use it before hitting limits.
| Plan | Price | Gets SpaceXAI's current model? | What the plan does not include |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Yes | No Expert mode, no video generation, no Grok Bot, real-time web and X search is "Limited" |
| SuperGrok Lite | Not published on the pricing page | Yes | -- |
| SuperGrok | $30/mo | Yes | -- |
| SuperGrok Plus | $100/mo | Yes | -- |
| SuperGrok Heavy | Not published on the pricing page | Yes | -- |
| Business | Contact sales | Yes | -- |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Yes | -- |
| SpaceXAI API (developers) | Metered, $2 / $6 per million tokens | Yes | -- |
| Cursor | All plans | Yes | -- |
Two honest gaps in that table. SpaceXAI publishes $0, $30/month and $100/month as figures on its pricing page -- the Lite and Heavy cards do not carry a price in the page's own markup, so we are not quoting numbers for them that we cannot source to SpaceXAI. And X's own Premium tiers are not on SpaceXAI's pricing page at all; X's help pages are not publicly readable, so this page does not tell you what Grok on X costs or includes. If that is your route in, the check below works regardless.
The 10-second check: open grok.com or the Grok app and look at the mode picker. The four modes are Auto, Fast, Expert and Heavy, with Fast set as the default and the only one available without a subscription. Read again on October 2, 2026, SpaceXAI's own page configuration now names Grok 4.7 behind Expert and Heavy, and still names no model at all behind Fast or Auto. Grok 4.5 does not appear on that page any more, and nor does Grok 4.6.
| Mode | Model named in the picker (October 2, 2026) | Free? |
|---|---|---|
| Fast | None named | Yes -- this is the default |
| Auto ("chooses Fast or Expert") | None named | No -- needs a subscription |
| Expert ("thinks hard") | Grok 4.7 | No -- needs a subscription |
| Heavy ("team of experts") | Grok 4.7 | No -- needs a subscription |
This is read from the configuration grok.com serves a logged-out visitor, so "needs a subscription" means "not offered to this session." A signed-in free account may be shown something different, and SpaceXAI publishes no plan-by-plan mode table to check it against.
What Grok 4.5 Costs
As a consumer, nothing -- and on the API, $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. The consumer answer is still $0: the pricing page's single model row, now Grok 4.6, is ticked for the free plan in the same place Grok 4.5 used to hold, and Fast mode remains the free default. What is no longer certain is whether free and paid run the same model, because the app's picker attaches Grok 4.7 to the paid modes only. The token price only matters if you are a developer, but it is the clearest signal of how SpaceXAI is positioning this model, so it is worth seeing next to the competition.
| Model | Input (per 1M tokens) | Output (per 1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.5 | $2.00 | $6.00 |
| Grok 4.3 (previous) | $1.25 | $2.50 |
| Anthropic Opus 5 (current Opus, July 24, 2026) | $5.00 | $25.00 |
Grok 4.5 is priced at roughly a quarter of Anthropic's Opus tier on output while claiming comparable quality. That Opus price has not moved: Claude Opus 5, released July 24, 2026, kept the same $5/$25 as the Opus models before it. It is, however, more expensive than the Grok 4.3 it succeeds -- so it is an upgrade you pay for, not a free bump. Per SpaceXAI's model docs it carries a 500,000-token context window and supports configurable reasoning effort (low, medium, or high, defaulting to high).
What's New in Grok 4.5
The headline change is speed and efficiency, not size. SpaceXAI's own launch announcement says Grok 4.5 was trained alongside Cursor, the AI coding editor the company acquired, "on datasets spanning knowledge in coding, science, engineering, and math," across "tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs." Its own docs describe it as the model to use "for everything else, including code," and pitch it as the most intelligent and fastest option in the lineup.
The numbers SpaceXAI publishes are all about doing the same work with less. It says Grok 4.5 is served at 80 tokens per second and reaches "roughly 2x the token efficiency of comparable leading models, solving tasks in under half the number of steps." On its own token-efficiency chart, Grok 4.5 finishes an average SWE Bench Pro task using 15,954 output tokens against Opus 4.8's 67,020 -- about 4.2x fewer. Fewer tokens for the same answer is what makes a $2/$6 model cheap in practice rather than just on the price list. It is also now the default model in Grok Build, SpaceXAI's app-building tool.
What it does not know: anything after February 1, 2026. Read on September 9, 2026, SpaceXAI's models page states that date as the cut-off for Grok 4.6 and states no cut-off for Grok 4.5 at all, so treat February 1 as the figure for the model you actually get rather than a fact this page can still source about 4.5. Either way, SpaceXAI states plainly that "Grok has no knowledge of current events or data beyond what was present in its training data" unless search tools are switched on. In the Grok app that matters less than it sounds, because real-time web and X search fill the gap -- but it is the reason Grok can confidently miss something that happened last month if you ask it cold.
For everyday users, the honest translation: this is a model tuned for coding and technical work that happens to also power your chatbot. If you use Grok to draft emails and settle arguments, you will notice speed more than genius.
Is It Actually Good?
It is credible but not a landslide -- and SpaceXAI's own charts say so. The launch announcement claims Grok 4.5 "exceeds comparable leading models," then publishes five benchmark charts in which it wins one. On the other four, Anthropic's Fable is ahead of it, and on three of those so is GPT-5.5. These are SpaceXAI's numbers, on SpaceXAI's page, chosen by SpaceXAI.
| Benchmark (SpaceXAI's own charts) | Grok 4.5 | Best score shown | Where Grok 4.5 places |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE Marathon (resolution rate) | 29.0% | Grok 4.5 | 1st |
| Terminal Bench 2.1 | 83.3% | Fable (max) 84.3% | 3rd |
| DeepSWE 1.0 | 62.0% | Fable (max) 66.1% | 3rd |
| SWE Bench Pro | 64.7% | Fable (max) 80.4% | 3rd |
| DeepSWE 1.1 | 53% | Fable (max) 70% | 4th |
Source: SpaceXAI, "Introducing Grok 4.5," July 8, 2026. Competitor figures are SpaceXAI's, drawn from the other developers' published system cards and leaderboards.
That is a meaningfully different situation from the pre-launch hype, when the pitch was that internal tests put it above Opus-class models. Musk's own framing was more restrained -- Grok 4.5 as "roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster", as reported at launch. What shipped is a fast, cheap, near-frontier model, which is a real achievement and also not the crown. Independent third-party testing remains thin, so treat any "beats GPT-5.6" or "beats Claude" headline with suspicion. Anthropic's current flagship is Claude Fable 5 -- the model beating Grok 4.5 in four of SpaceXAI's own five charts.
Read that table the right way, though. Every one of those benchmarks measures software engineering, because that is what Grok 4.5 was built for. None of them tells you whether it writes a better birthday message than Gemini. For everyday chat, the gap between any of these models is far smaller than the gap between the benchmarks suggests.
Grok 4.5 in the EU: The Block Has Partly Lifted
The EU block lifted on July 17, 2026 -- for developers. SpaceXAI's launch post carried a one-line note at the bottom: "Grok 4.5 is not yet available in the EU in any SpaceXAI products or the API console. EU availability is expected in mid-July." No further explanation was given. Nine days later its release notes added a matching one-liner: "Grok 4.5 is now available in the API console for EU users."
That entry covers the API console specifically. SpaceXAI has published nothing about the consumer Grok apps or grok.com in Europe, so we cannot tell you that your EU Grok app now serves 4.5 -- only that the region-wide freeze the company described at launch is no longer absolute.
The practical advice for EU readers is the same as everywhere else, and it is cheap to follow: do not upgrade your plan hoping that money unlocks the model. Open the mode picker on the plan you already have and look. Everything in it is now Grok 4.6, on every plan, and Grok 4.5 is no longer offered anywhere.
What changed (July 22, 2026): this section previously said the EU was excluded "with access expected mid-July." SpaceXAI's changelog now records EU API access as live since July 17, so the section was rewritten and the timeline row corrected.
Should You Pay for It?
Do not pay to get the newest Grok yet, but this advice is weaker than it was. For Grok 4.5 and Grok 4.6 it was clean: the model sat on the free plan, and the paid tiers bought the same Grok allowed to think longer (Expert and Heavy), plus video generation and higher limits. Grok 4.7 breaks the pattern on one of the two surfaces -- grok.com names it behind the paid modes only, while the pricing page still has a single Grok 4.6 row ticked for Free. Until SpaceXAI puts a Grok 4.7 row on the pricing page, the honest answer is that free Grok is still excellent and may no longer be running the newest model. Try it for $0 before you decide.
Pay if you keep hitting the ceiling. The things a subscription genuinely unlocks are concrete: Expert and Heavy reasoning modes for hard multi-step problems, video generation, unrestricted real-time web and X search rather than the free tier's "Limited" version, and higher rate limits across the board. If free Grok keeps cutting you off mid-task, $30/month for SuperGrok buys headroom rather than intelligence.
Skip it if Grok is your third chatbot. Paying $30 for a secondary assistant is hard to justify when Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude all have capable free tiers and their $20 plans cover more ground. Keep free Grok installed for its X integration and spend the money elsewhere -- our guide to which AI chatbot you should pay for lays out that call.
Developers, get it if you already live in Cursor or on the API -- at $2/$6 per million tokens with claimed 2x token efficiency, Grok 4.5 is one of the cheapest ways to run a near-frontier model, and that is the use case it was explicitly built and trained for.
The bottom line: the practical answer to "do I get Grok 4.5?" is that you get its replacement, for the same $0. Grok 4.5 was a genuinely strong, unusually cheap model that SpaceXAI put on the free plan, and Grok 4.6 took its place across every consumer plan by August 15, 2026, Free included. Since September 21, 2026 there is a Grok 4.7 as well, and the two SpaceXAI surfaces disagree about who gets it: the pricing page still says Grok 4.6 for everyone, the app picker says Grok 4.7 for Expert and Heavy only. Open the app, leave it on Fast, and you are on the free model either way -- and the question worth answering, for free, is still whether you use it enough to want Expert mode.
Corrections and Updates
October 2, 2026: this page said the Grok you open today runs Grok 4.6, and SpaceXAI released a Grok 4.7 eleven days before this check. The title, summary and closing all said Grok 4.6 was SpaceXAI's current model with no successor. SpaceXAI announced Grok 4.7 on September 21, 2026 -- "SpaceXAI's most powerful model for coding and knowledge work" -- and on grok.com, read October 2, the Expert mode now reads "Thinks hard - Grok 4.7" and Heavy reads "Team of Experts - Grok 4.7", both marked as requiring an upgrade. Two things did not change and are worth stating so this correction is not read as more than it is: the pricing page's single model row, on the newest capture we can read (September 28, 2026), still says Grok 4.6 and is still ticked for all seven plans including Free, with no Grok 4.7 row; and Grok 4.7's own announcement names its availability as "Cursor and Grok Build ... the Grok API, third-party coding harnesses, and model routers and cloud platforms" and does not mention the consumer Grok apps at all. So the consumer picture is a disagreement between two SpaceXAI surfaces, and both readings are now on this page.
September 9, 2026: the February 1, 2026 cut-off is Grok 4.6's, not Grok 4.5's. This page cited SpaceXAI's models page for "Grok 4.5's knowledge cut-off." Re-read on September 9, 2026, that page states the cut-off for Grok 4.6 only and states none for Grok 4.5. The date itself is unchanged and the practical answer is unchanged, because Grok 4.6 is the model on every plan. Re-verified in the same read: grok-4.5 is still live on the API, listed alongside grok-4.6 at $2 and $6 per million tokens, so its retirement is from the consumer plans only.
September 2, 2026 (re-verified): still Grok 4.6, and still free.
August 28, 2026: Grok 4.5 has been retired from SpaceXAI's consumer plans, and this page said otherwise for thirteen days.
August 12, 2026: Grok 4.5 is no longer SpaceXAI's newest model. SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 that day, and sentences calling 4.5 "the newest model" were corrected to say it was the model the app ran. (Superseded: Grok 4.6 replaced Grok 4.5 on every consumer plan, Free included, by August 15, 2026. See the August 28 entry above.)
July 28, 2026: this page previously told you Grok 4.5 runs on a "new V9 foundation at roughly 1.5 trillion parameters, about triple the size." That was wrong and came from a crypto news blog; SpaceXAI's launch post publishes no parameter count, architecture name or size comparison, so the claim was removed rather than re-sourced.
July 26, 2026: this page previously said no free Grok tier included Grok 4.5 and that paid consumer plans were still receiving it in stages.
Read next
Keep up without the jargonGrok 4.6 Explained: Free on Every Plan, and Grok 4.7 Has Taken the Paid Modes
SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026 as a developer-only launch, then put it on every consumer plan including Free. Its pricing page still does, checked on the September 28, 2026 capture. But grok.com's mode picker has moved on: the paid Expert and Heavy modes now name Grok 4.7, announced September 21, 2026.
Which AI Chatbot Should You Pay For in 2026?
For most people, ChatGPT Plus at $20/month is the best-value paid chatbot. Choose Google AI Pro ($19.99) if you live in Google apps, or Claude Pro ($20, $17 on annual) if you mostly write and work with documents. Light users stay free, and college students should take Google's free year first.
The Best Free AI Chatbot in 2026
Google Gemini is the best free AI chatbot for most people in 2026: solid models, image generation, and Deep Research at no cost. But free ChatGPT now runs GPT-5.6 Luna with unlimited text chats, confirmed by OpenAI, so pick it if you chat in long sessions. Free Claude quietly gives you Sonnet 5.5, new on September 28, 2026.
Is ChatGPT Plus Worth It in 2026?
ChatGPT Plus is worth $20 a month if you want deeper reasoning or do heavy file and image work. The old reason to upgrade is gone: OpenAI has confirmed free ChatGPT now has unlimited everyday text chats. Plus includes no video either.
GPT-5.6 Sol Explained: What's New and What It Means for You
GPT-5.6 is here. On July 9, 2026, OpenAI released its flagship Sol plus the lower-cost Terra and Luna. Paid plans get Sol; Free and Go get Luna. From September 14, 2026 ChatGPT no longer switches from Instant to Thinking by itself on Plus and Pro, and the Higher intelligence setting is gone from the web on those plans.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Grok 4.5 release date?
July 8, 2026. SpaceXAI (the company behind Grok, formerly xAI) announced it that day and it went live immediately for developers on the API and in Cursor. It reached consumer Grok apps the following day, though not on every plan at once.
Can I use Grok 4.5 right now?
Not by name any more. SpaceXAI replaced the Grok 4.5 row with Grok 4.6 in August 2026, ticked on every plan including Free. Since September 21, 2026 there is also a Grok 4.7, which grok.com names behind the paid Expert and Heavy modes. The pricing page has not caught up.
Is Grok 4.5 free?
It was, and its successor is. SpaceXAI still ticks Grok 4.6 for the Free plan in the row Grok 4.5 used to occupy, checked on the September 28, 2026 capture. The newer rule is less clean: grok.com now names Grok 4.7 only behind the paid Expert and Heavy modes, so paying may now buy a newer model.
Is Grok 4.5 available in the EU?
The question has moved on, because Grok 4.5 is retired everywhere. While it was current, SpaceXAI's changelog opened the API console to EU users on July 17, 2026, after a July 8 launch without EU access, and published nothing about the consumer Grok apps in Europe. Open your own mode picker to see which model it names for you.
Is Grok 4.5 better than Claude or ChatGPT?
Not on SpaceXAI's own numbers. Its launch post published five coding benchmarks, and Claude's Fable model scores higher on four of them. Grok 4.5 wins on price and speed instead: $2 per million input tokens, 80 tokens per second, and about 4x fewer tokens per task.
Does Grok 4.5 know about recent events?
Only through search. SpaceXAI's models page no longer publishes a cut-off for Grok 4.5. Either way, SpaceXAI says Grok has no knowledge beyond its training data unless web or X search is switched on, so what the model was trained on matters less than whether search is enabled.
How much does Grok 4.5 cost?
Nothing on the free plan, then or now. SpaceXAI publishes three consumer prices on its pricing page: Free at $0, SuperGrok at $30 a month and SuperGrok Plus at $100 a month, with Lite, Heavy, Business and Enterprise tiers alongside them. Developers pay $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output.