Claude Opus 4.6 vs Grok 4

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Grok 4: Grok 4 is cheaper by 40% on average. Claude Opus 4.6 from Azure AI Foundry (200,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls) vs. Grok 4 from xAI (256,000-token context, tool calls). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.

Side-by-side cost

Live workload comparison

Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.

3,000
0256,000
400
0200,000
5,000
01,000,000
Azure AI Foundry
$3,805/mo
Input $5.00/M · Output $25.00/M
Grok 4Cheaper
xAI
$2,283/mo
Input $3.00/M · Output $15.00/M
At this workload, Grok 4 is 40% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 — a savings of $1,522/month ($18,263/year).
Production recipe — Agent Command Center
strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
  model: grok-4
  provider: xai
fallback:
  model: claude-opus-4-6
  provider: azure-ai-foundry
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 }   # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live
Claude Opus 4.6 Grok 4
xAI
Input price $5.00/M $3.00/M
Output price $25.00/M $15.00/M
Context window 200,000 256,000
Max output 128,000 256,000
Function calling
Vision
Audio input
Reasoning
Prompt caching
Structured output
Pricing verified May 12, 2026 May 12, 2026
Cheaper option
~40% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6
Larger context
256,000 tokens
More capabilities
5 of 6 capability flags advertised

Benchmark comparison

Side-by-side public benchmark scores. Greener bar = winner.

Chatbot Arena ELOgeneral
Claude Opus 4.6
1,502
Grok 4
1,459
MATH-500math
Claude Opus 4.6
Grok 4
98.0%
AIME 2024math
Claude Opus 4.6
Grok 4
93.3%
τ-bench (retail)agent
Claude Opus 4.6
91.9%
Grok 4
GPQA Diamondreasoning
Claude Opus 4.6
91.3%
Grok 4
87.5%
MMLUgeneral
Claude Opus 4.6
91.1%
Grok 4
MMLU-Proreasoning
Claude Opus 4.6
Grok 4
86.6%
SWE-bench Verifiedagent⚠ different settings
Claude Opus 4.6
81.4%
Grok 4
72.0%
BFCL v3agent
Claude Opus 4.6
Grok 4
79.5%
LiveCodeBenchcode
Claude Opus 4.6
Grok 4
79.4%
MMMU-Promultimodal
Claude Opus 4.6
73.9%
Grok 4
ARC-AGI-2reasoning⚠ different settings
Claude Opus 4.6
68.8%
Grok 4
15.9%
Humanity's Last Examreasoning⚠ different settings
Claude Opus 4.6
53.0%
Grok 4
25.4%