Grok 4.7: Coding Gains at the Same List Rate
MODELS & COSTS
Grok 4.7: Coding Gains at the Same List Rate
SpaceXAI is the AI division of SpaceX — logo: SpaceXAI, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Musk said ten days. It took nineteen.
Grok 4.7's vendor card reports a substantial long-horizon coding improvement at unchanged list rates. The independent index shows a smaller overall change. Both results help explain the release, but neither makes the cost of an existing agent workload predictable without its token and retry counts.
In this article
The vendor card reports a near doubling of the long-horizon coding score. The independent index shows a smaller overall gain. Both results belong in the comparison because they measure different aspects of the release.
Release details
Grok 4.7 is a new, larger base model than Grok 4.6, trained with a longer reinforcement-learning run on a harder task mix — weighted, in xAI's words, "toward problems that take many hours to complete." The launch post also says the model is better at verifying its own work and at managing long context, and that it was trained to natively understand the Grok Bot harness, which is the piece that matters if you're one of the people running always-on Grok Bots rather than chatting.
Pricing is the part that will get quoted: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, unchanged from Grok 4.6, with a fast variant at twice the output speed for twice the price. Context stays at 500K. Weights are still proprietary, and xAI still hasn't published a parameter count — the widely repeated "2.1 trillion" number comes from Musk's September 2 posts on X, not from the launch page.
| Grok 4.7 at a glance | Detail |
|---|---|
| Base model | New and larger than Grok 4.6. No official parameter count (the 2.1T figure is Musk's) |
| Context window | 500K tokens, unchanged |
| List price | $2 per 1M input tokens / $6 per 1M output tokens — same as Grok 4.6 |
| Fast variant | Twice the output speed at twice the price |
| Where to run it | Cursor, Grok Build, xAI API, third-party harnesses, routers and cloud platforms |
| Trained for | Long RL run weighted toward multi-hour tasks, self-verification, and the Grok Bot harness |
| Safety claims | New safeguard stack; 62.4% on LatchBio's biosafety benchmark; 3.3% risky-prompt pass-through on HackerBench v0.3 — all vendor-reported |
xAI's official launch card compares Grok 4.7 xHigh against Grok 4.6 High, GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Fable 5.1 Max. Every figure on it is vendor-reported — image: SpaceXAI
Read that card the way a competitor would. Grok 4.7 wins five of the seven benchmark rows against GPT-5.6 Sol and loses two (DeepSWE v1.1 71.0% against 72.7%, HealthBench Professional 56.7% against 60.5%). Against Fable 5.1 it takes three rows and drops four. It beats both of them badly on price, though: Sol charges $4 in and $20 out, Fable 5.1 charges $10 and $50.
Every row on the card moved up from Grok 4.6 at the same $2/$6 price. Terminal-Bench 4.0 gained 17.7 points — my chart, from xAI's vendor-reported numbers
Terminal-Bench 4.0 going from 20.3% to 38.0% is the number to remember. That's the benchmark where Grok 4.6 got hammered in August — 26% on the 3.0 version of the suite, against GPT-5.6 Sol's 34.6% — and it's the one closest to what agentic coding actually feels like: a model left alone in a terminal, tasked with finishing something multi-step without a human nudging it. Nearly doubling it in forty days is the single most interesting thing on the page.
The announced timing and actual release
On September 11, one day before the stated target, Musk described the delay in an X reply:
"Grok 4.7 needs a few more days to cook. We might have penalized response length too much (or something) in RL, as it still gives up on hard tasks (that it can do!) too early and isn't yet sufficiently rigorous in checking its work."Elon Musk, on X, September 11, 2026 — 2.1M views
Now put that next to the launch post, which says Grok 4.7 "works longer on difficult tasks" and "checks its own work more carefully." The two sentences are the same sentence — one is the bug report, the other is the changelog. And that's the cleanest evidence the extra nine days went somewhere real, rather than into a marketing calendar.
Forty days from 4.6 to 4.7 — with Musk naming Grok 4.8 before 4.7 had shipped. My chart, dates from xAI's news posts and Musk's X replies
Meanwhile the rest of the industry wasn't waiting. The first three days of September alone produced Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, Meta's Muse Spark 1.3, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and GPT-6 Astra. Grok 4.7 arrived three weeks into that wave, and by then Musk had already recalibrated expectations in public — "roughly on par with Opus 5.0, not 5.1," he said on September 14, "better in some ways, worse in others," pointing at multimodal performance as the gap that still needed work.
Musk spent the delay posting the roadmap instead of the model: 4.8 finishing pretraining, 4.9 "probably Astra/Fable class," Grok 5 as the AGI bet. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The long-horizon coding result
The launch card's four columns are Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5.1. Eighteen days earlier OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, and it appears nowhere on the card. The Hacker News thread on the announcement zeroed in on that fast — one commenter asked whether leaving Astra out "can't have been an oversight," and a reply gave the answer that holds up:
"You can't use Astra in Cursor, and cursorbench uses cursor as the harness. They can't actually benchmark it using their harness hence why its not included."A reply in the Hacker News thread on the Grok 4.7 announcement
That's not a dodge, it's a consequence of the corporate situation. On August 28 OpenAI said it would wind down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor — shutoff proposed for November 12 — and that it would stop providing future models to Cursor, naming Astra as the model it wants held to its terms. Astra launched six days later. A CursorBench 4.0 table physically cannot contain it.
You can still read the omission as a choice, because the card's ordering is xAI's to make, and the rival they did put in the second OpenAI column is the one Grok 4.7 beats. That's normal launch-page behavior, and it's why I don't treat vendor cards as scoreboards — I treat them as a specification of what the vendor thinks it can win.
Third parties close the gap. Cursor's own public CursorBench leaderboard is still on version 3.2 and doesn't list Grok 4.7 at all yet, so the 46.3% on the card is currently uncross-checkable. Benchmark aggregator BenchLM marks Grok 4.7 "not publicly ranked," with the best verified rows belonging to Fable 5.1 on CursorBench (51.8%), Muse Spark 1.3 on DeepSWE (75.4%), Mythos 5.1 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (60.9%) and GPT-6 Astra on HealthBench Professional (63.4%).
Independent results alongside xAI’s card
Artificial Analysis, which measures models itself rather than reprinting vendor numbers, has Grok 4.7 at 46 on its Intelligence Index. That is two points ahead of Grok 4.6 (44) and one point behind GPT-5.6 Sol (47) — a very small step, for a model that's larger than its predecessor and a full month newer.
Where Grok 4.7 lands on Artificial Analysis' index, with each model's list output price. Grok 4.7 is the cheapest model on this list except Gemini 3.8 Flash and Muse Spark 1.3 — my chart, data from artificialanalysis.ai, retrieved September 22
Look at the orange bar and then look at the row under it. Muse Spark 1.3 scores 48 at $1.25 in and $4.25 out. Gemini 3.8 Flash scores 41 at $0.75 and $3.75. Grok 4.7's real claim isn't "frontier for cheap" — it's "frontier-adjacent at a price the frontier stopped charging", and it's sharing that shelf with a couple of cheaper models. The top of the list is still Astra and Fable 5.1 at 53, and both of them cost $10 in and $50 out to get there.
There's a second, less flattering number hiding in Artificial Analysis' data. To complete their Intelligence Index, Grok 4.7 generated 240M output tokens. Grok 4.6 used 94M for its run. AA labels that "very verbose" — 4 out of 4 on their verbosity scale. Caveat, and it's a real one: 4.7 was run at its xhigh reasoning effort and 4.6 at high, so some of that gap is a setting, not a personality trait. But a commenter in the launch thread framed the underlying issue better than any chart does — "Token price doesn't tell you much without knowing token efficiency." If your agent burns 2.5x the output tokens per task, "same price" doesn't mean "same bill."
Two data points AA hasn't published yet: 4.7's speed and its cost per Intelligence Index task. Both were still blank when I pulled the page.
List prices and provider routes
List price is the same as Grok 4.6: $2 in, $6 out, with a fast variant at $4/$12. The interesting wrinkle is what the routers show. On OpenRouter, xAI's own endpoint lists Grok 4.7 at $1.60 in and $4.80 out with cache reads at $0.40 — 20% under the list price, and under Grok 4.6's $2/$6 on the same page. xAI's blog post doesn't mention a discount, so I'm not going to invent a reason for it. Either it's a launch promotion or a quiet cut that hasn't reached the announcement; both are worth knowing before you commit a codebase to it.
Availability on day one: Cursor, Grok Build, and the xAI API — plus third-party coding harnesses, model routers and cloud platforms. There's no mention of grok.com or the X apps in the announcement, which is consistent with Grok 4.6's pattern: the coding surfaces get the model first, the chat apps catch up later. If you want to poke at it without paying, xAI is pointing people at Grok Build (x.ai/build).
Grok Build is where xAI wants you to try 4.7 first — the agent harness the model was trained to understand natively. Image: SpaceXAI
The comparison with Fable 5.1
No — not on the benchmarks, and xAI's own card is the evidence. Fable 5.1 wins CursorBench 4.0 (51.8% vs 46.3%), Terminal-Bench 4.0 (57.9% vs 38.0%), HealthBench Professional (62.1% vs 56.7%) and AA Briefcase v1.1 (1,678 vs 1,657). Grok 4.7 wins EEBench (64.0% vs 56.4%) and the legal-agent benchmark by an absurd margin (19.6% vs 6.7%). Fable 5.1 also costs five times more on input and more than eight times more on output.
The cited scores and rates make Grok 4.7 one candidate for a cost-sensitive agent test. Compare completed work and total tokens on the intended task. A lower list rate and a lower aggregate index score do not, on their own, determine the cheaper successful workflow.
The community split tracks that. In the same Hacker News thread, one commenter who had been running Grok in Cursor for months reported the results were "highly superior" to another agent, and another called Grok Build "a no nonsense model and stays on its course." A third described the opposite experience — Grok ending tasks almost immediately and claiming "Done!", calling it "the laziest and most 'dishonest' of all the models... I can't use Grok for any serious coding task." Neither comment is about 4.7 itself — nobody in that thread had run it yet — and the second describes the exact failure mode Musk said the RL run had caused. That's the thing to test in your own repo this week, not in anyone's benchmark table.
The Terminal-Bench change and the self-verification description point toward a focus on completing longer tasks. That is a plausible interpretation of xAI’s results, not evidence that premature stopping has been solved in a user’s codebase.
What I'm not going to pretend: one vendor card, one independent index that shows a two-point gain, and a public safety claim ("strongest model we've tested on refusals and jailbreak resistance", 62.4% on LatchBio's biosafety benchmark) that nobody outside xAI has verified yet. The card's omission of Astra is defensible for mechanical reasons and still worth remembering when you read the headline number.
Musk’s September 14 comments about Grok 4.8 and 4.9 were roadmap claims at the time of this article. Independent speed and cost-per-task measurements for 4.7 would be more directly useful for deciding whether to migrate an existing workload.
Sources: SpaceXAI — Introducing Grok 4.7 · announcement on X · Musk on the delay (Sep 11) · Musk vs Opus 5.0 (Sep 14) · Artificial Analysis — Grok 4.7 · OpenRouter pricing · OpenAI's decision on Cursor · HN discussion
Earlier on this blog: Grok 4.6 — Frontier Grade, Half the Price · Grok Bot — AI Teammates With Computers of Their Own
Everything here is vendor-reported unless it says otherwise; my charts are redrawn from the sources named in their captions. Published September 22, 2026.