Grok 4.5 Explained: Release Date, Price, and Whether You Get It

What changed (August 12, 2026): Grok 4.5 is no longer SpaceXAI's newest model. SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 today. Nothing on this page stops being true: Grok 4.5 is still the model behind every mode in the Grok app, still free on the Free plan, and still what you are talking to when you open Grok. The new model is developer-only so far -- SpaceXAI's own "where it runs" list names the API, Grok Build, Cursor and three gateways, and grok.com's mode picker still showed Grok 4.5 in Fast, Expert and Heavy when we checked it today. Sentences calling 4.5 "the newest model" have been corrected to say what it actually is now: the model the app runs. Full detail in Grok 4.6, explained.

What changed (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 came from a crypto news blog, not from SpaceXAI. SpaceXAI's own launch announcement contains no parameter count, no architecture name, and no size comparison at all, so the claim has been removed rather than re-sourced. In its place are the numbers SpaceXAI does publish: the training setup, 80 tokens per second, 2x token efficiency, the February 1, 2026 knowledge cut-off, and the five benchmark charts from the launch post -- on four of which Claude's Fable model beats Grok 4.5. Several facts previously credited to launch coverage now cite SpaceXAI directly.

What changed (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. That was wrong. SpaceXAI's own pricing page lists Grok 4.5 as included on every plan -- Free, SuperGrok Lite, SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy, Business and Enterprise -- and has done so since at least July 13, 2026. The grok.com mode picker agrees: every mode in it runs Grok 4.5, and the default mode you get without paying is Fast. The availability table, verdict and FAQ below have all been rewritten around SpaceXAI's own pages instead of a third-party plan tracker.

Grok 4.5 is out, and the headline for a normal person is simpler than the launch coverage suggested: you already have it, free. SpaceXAI -- the company behind Grok, which now brands itself SpaceXAI rather than xAI on its own developer docs -- released the model on July 8, 2026, ending a private beta that had run inside SpaceX and Tesla since late June. The rollout was staged and confusing for its first days, which is why so much of the web still says Grok 4.5 is a paid-tier exclusive. It is not. This page lays out the release date, who gets what, the price, and whether the paid tiers are worth anything to you.

Key Takeaways

• Release date: July 8, 2026. Grok 4.5 shipped publicly that day, roughly six weeks after its original late-May target.
• It is free. SpaceXAI's pricing page lists Grok 4.5 on every consumer plan, Free included, and grok.com serves it by default in Fast mode. There is no Grok 4 left in the mode picker.
• What you pay for is reasoning depth, not the model. Free gets Fast. The Auto, Expert and Heavy modes -- all still Grok 4.5, just allowed to think longer -- require a subscription, as does video generation.
• SpaceXAI publishes two consumer prices: Free at $0 and SuperGrok at $30/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.
• It does not know anything after February 1, 2026. That is SpaceXAI's published knowledge cut-off for Grok 4.5. Live web and X search cover recent events; the model on its own does not.
• 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.

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 Use Grok 4.5 Yet? Availability by Plan

Yes, on every plan, including the free one. SpaceXAI's pricing page has a plan comparison matrix, and the "Grok 4.5" row is ticked for all six tiers it lists. What actually 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.

Two honest gaps in that table. SpaceXAI publishes only $0 and $30/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, and SpaceXAI's own page configuration describes all four as Grok 4.5, with Fast set as the default and the only one available without a subscription. There is no Grok 4 option left to be stuck on.

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 the important one and it is genuinely $0: Grok 4.5 in Fast mode is on the free plan. 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.

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. That is Grok 4.5's knowledge cut-off, and 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.

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 Grok 4.5.

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 just to get Grok 4.5. This is the part most coverage has backwards. The model is on the free plan, and the paid tiers do not give you a smarter Grok -- they give you the same Grok allowed to think longer (Expert and Heavy), plus video generation and higher limits. If your goal was "try the new Grok," you are done, for $0.

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: Grok 4.5 is a genuinely strong, unusually cheap model, and the practical answer to "do I get it?" is yes, today, without paying. The staged launch on July 8 left a lot of pages saying otherwise, including an earlier version of this one. Open the Grok app, leave it on Fast, and you are talking to the model SpaceXAI still runs in its consumer app -- Grok 4.6 arrived on August 12, 2026 for developers and has not reached the app. The only real question left is whether you use it enough to want Expert mode -- and you can answer that for free first.