Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Grok 4.5

Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Grok 4.5 only becomes the better choice if agentic is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the cleaner provisional overall profile here, landing at 77 versus 75. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.

Claude Sonnet 4.6's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 69.1 against 64.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 59.1% to 83.3%. Grok 4.5 does hit back in agentic, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $2.00 input / $6.00 output per 1M tokens for Grok 4.5. That is roughly 2.5x on output cost alone. Grok 4.5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Grok 4.5 gives you the larger context window at 500K, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.6.