Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.6

Claude Opus 5 is a large language model with multimodal vision capabilities developed by Anthropic, released on July 24, 2026 as the fourth model in the Claude 5 family. It sits in the Opus tier of Anthropic's lineup, positioned below the Mythos-class Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, and is framed by Anthropic as the go-to model for most knowledge work and automation tasks. The model approaches Fable 5's capabilities at roughly half the cost, priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. It becomes the default model on Claude Max and the strongest model available on Claude Pro. The model ships with a 1 million token context window and an adjustable "effort" parameter that allows users to trade reasoning depth for speed and token savings. Early enterprise customers reported that Opus 5 achieved comparable performance to Opus 4.8's maximum-reasoning mode while generating significantly fewer tokens on average, and demonstrated higher accuracy on financial modeling tasks with fewer tool calls and less time.

Claude Opus 5 supports multimodal inputs including images and text, and is designed for agentic workflows, coding, scientific research, and complex enterprise tasks. Anthropic reports the model scores 10.2 percentage points higher than Opus 4.8 on an internal chemistry benchmark, making it the most capable generally available model for scientific research in the Claude lineup. Cyber classifiers on Opus 5 are designed to intervene approximately 85 percent less often than those on Fable 5, with fallback to Opus 4.8 when a classifier triggers. The model does not retain user data for 30 days, unlike Fable 5. It is available across Anthropic's platforms including Claude Code and Claude Cowork, as well as cloud partners.

Grok 4.6 is a proprietary reasoning model from xAI aimed at long-running agentic workflows, coding, and knowledge work. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with a 500,000 token context window and a knowledge cutoff of February 1, 2026. The model exposes an adjustable reasoning budget with low, medium, high, and xhigh settings, where high is the default, and it supports function calling, structured outputs, web and X search, and code execution as documented tool behaviors. Its visual capability covers interpreting images supplied alongside text prompts, which places it in the visual question answering and document understanding family rather than producing pixel level outputs such as boxes or masks.

xAI characterizes Grok 4.6 as the result of an extended post-training run over the Grok 4.5 lineage rather than a new pretrained base. The described recipe combines curated model-generated reasoning and technical data, engineering data, a revised optimizer, regenerated supervised fine-tuning trajectories, and reinforcement learning across agent environments spanning knowledge work, coding, kernel optimization, web development, and computer-aided design. Parameter count and architecture specifics are not disclosed. Independent measurement from Artificial Analysis places the model at 61 on its Intelligence Index, five points above Grok 4.5.