Claude Haiku 5.5 Max vs Grok 4.6 Xhigh: which is cheaper?

Claude Haiku 5.5 (Max) (Anthropic) and Grok 4.6 (Xhigh) (SpaceXAI) meet here on their recorded benchmark, price and speed data. Price separates them more than anything else; on a blended basis Grok 4.6 Xhigh costs 15 times as much as Claude Haiku 5.5 Max. What follows is built entirely from tracked data, so where the catalogue is silent, this page says so instead of guessing.

What they cost

Claude Haiku 5.5 Max lists $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens; Grok 4.6 Xhigh lists $2.00 and $6.00. Grok 4.6 Xhigh costs 12 times as much per output token.

Take 1 million input tokens and 200,000 output tokens: that comes to $0.20 on Claude Haiku 5.5 Max and $3.20 on Grok 4.6 Xhigh. A bigger example, writing 2,000 drafts of 2,000 output tokens from 300-token prompts, costs $2.06 on Claude Haiku 5.5 Max and $25.20 on Grok 4.6 Xhigh: a gap of $23.14. On a 3:1 blend of input to output tokens, that works out to $0.20 versus $3.00 per million.

Throughput and time to first token

Once a response is under way, Claude Haiku 5.5 Max produces roughly 233 tokens per second against 62 tokens per second for Grok 4.6 Xhigh. Claude Haiku 5.5 Max is ahead by 277% on throughput. The wait for the first token averages 4.6 minutes on Claude Haiku 5.5 Max against 47 seconds on Grok 4.6 Xhigh. Claude Haiku 5.5 Max writes faster once it starts, but Grok 4.6 Xhigh's head start is large enough that Grok 4.6 Xhigh still finishes first at any typical reply length; Claude Haiku 5.5 Max only catches up beyond about 19,000 tokens. Waits that long are felt on every chat-style request, though they matter less for batch jobs.

For an 800-token response, first token plus generation comes to roughly 4.7 minutes on Claude Haiku 5.5 Max and 60 seconds on Grok 4.6 Xhigh.

Release timing

Claude Haiku 5.5 Max arrived on October 7, 2026, about 2 months after Grok 4.6 Xhigh (August 12, 2026).

The headline benchmark

Claude Haiku 5.5 Max records 36.5 on the intelligence index and Grok 4.6 Xhigh records 31.0. It is a meaningful gap rather than a rounding difference. Put another way, Grok 4.6 Xhigh would need 18% more on this index to draw level.

Among 109 active scored models, Claude Haiku 5.5 Max sits 37th and Grok 4.6 Xhigh 49th.

For coding or maths work specifically, the catalogue has no dedicated index on either side yet.

Score per dollar

Dividing the blended price by the intelligence index gives a rough cost per point: $0.0055 for Claude Haiku 5.5 Max and $0.097 for Grok 4.6 Xhigh, per million tokens. With the higher score and the lower cost per point, Claude Haiku 5.5 Max is the better value per point on these numbers.