Grok 4.7 shipped Monday, closing the countdown this column has been clocking since the window opened in early September. The surprise is not the model — mid-pack on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 46 against Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 at 53 each, and a 26% on Terminal-Bench 4.0’s agentic-coding set that trails GPT-6 Astra’s 60% and Fable 5.1’s 55%. It’s the price: $2 per million input tokens, $6 per million output, at a 500k context — a Western flagship priced where the Chinese open-weight layer lives. The release the industry watched as a capability event shipped as a price event.
The countdown that missed twice closed as a price event
What happened. SpaceXAI (xAI) launched Grok 4.7 with the model card live at docs.x.ai: 500k context, configurable reasoning, knowledge cutoff May 2026, priced $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output. Built on a larger base model with longer reinforcement learning and better self-verification, and available through the Grok API, Cursor, and Grok Build. This is the release Musk booked for early September, pushed through a second window, then delayed with a public note about RL reward shaping — the countdown-follow-up this column owes now has its model card to read.
Why it matters. The price is the event hiding inside the launch. A Western frontier lab rating its flagship at $2/$6 puts the closed lane’s per-token cost in the same band traders reserve for open and Chinese models — exactly the discount operators were told only the open layer would deliver. But price is not the edge where agents actually run: Grok 4.7’s 26% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding sits under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 27% and well behind the 55–60% of the closed pair. Cheap tokens buy a mid-pack model; they don’t buy agent-grade reliability. Shop on the coding bench, not the price card.
What I’m watching
Whether $2/$6 bends the rest of the frontier before DevDay on September 29 and Anthropic’s reported low-price card (still an unverified Tuesday leak, no card up yet). One take: the frontier’s value lane just got a discount floor from the model that was watched as a benchmark story — the pricing answer, not the Elo answer, is what competitors have to match first.
Source: docs.x.ai, the-decoder.com