xAI: Grok 4.5 Available on the API with Adjustable Reasoning-Effort Levels and Pricing from $2 per Token

What is reasoning-effort and why does it matter?

Reasoning-effort is an adjustable level of “thinking” the model performs before generating a response, a parameter that represents a trade-off between accuracy, cost, and response speed. Grok 4.5, xAI’s latest language model, now lets users adjust that level directly through the xAI API, depending on whether a task calls for a fast answer or deeper analysis.

Pricing and availability

Grok 4.5 on the xAI API costs $2 per million input tokens (units of text the model processes) and $6 per million output tokens. xAI has made the model available through its API, but the official release notes state only the month of release, “July 2026,” without a precise date. 24-ai.news reports this fact with an explicit note about the source changelog’s imprecision, so the date is not mistakenly presented as confirmed.

Comparison with previous Grok models

Grok 4.3, the previous generation of the model, recently became generally available (GA) on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon’s platform that lets developers access various AI models through the cloud. Grok 4.5, by contrast, comes directly through xAI’s own API, with an emphasis on the adjustability of the reasoning-effort parameter as a standout new feature that xAI had not particularly highlighted in previous releases.

What this means for the market

xAI’s release notes for Grok 4.5 do not list specific benchmark results, so for now only information about pricing and the adjustability of the model’s thinking level is publicly available. The price of $2 for input and $6 for output tokens positions Grok 4.5 within an API ecosystem where developers increasingly choose between multiple reasoning levels, depending on whether a task requires maximum accuracy at a higher cost or a faster, cheaper answer at a lower thinking level.