Real head-to-head · same prompt, one shot
Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.6
The new Anthropic flagship — benched on all 45 one-shot builds the day it landed. vs Frontier intelligence at half the frontier price.
Head-to-head verdict: Claude Opus 5 wins 17–3.
What I tested — same prompt, two models
I run the same fixed prompt set through every new model the day it drops — same string, one shot, single HTML file out — and I score the result 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. Below is what came out when I gave the exact same prompts to Claude Opus 5 and Grok 4.6, side by side, on 20 shared tasks inside the Agent Operating System.
Both models were given identical prompts inside the Agent Operating System — no help, no iteration, no "best of N" tricks. I run each prompt once, save the HTML file the model produces, and score it 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The scoring is mine. The verdicts below are pulled from my source comparison guides at agentos.guide where I publish every score and the reasoning behind it.
Claude Opus 5 · Benched on all 45 GoldieBench tasks via API on release day, incremental deploys as scores landed.
Grok 4.6 · Benched on 16 skill-infused game builds, every one played through its full gameplay arc before scoring, then the broken ones were handed back to Grok 4.6 to repair itself.
Side-by-side on 50 shared tasks
Click any cell to play that model's actual one-shot attempt. Medals are derived from my 0–10 scores per task (highest = 🥇, second = 🥈, third = 🥉).
Task ↓
Claude Opus 5
Grok 4.6
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
Game
— not attempted —
Game
— not attempted —
Game
— not attempted —
Other
— not attempted —
Where Claude Opus 5 beat Grok 4.6
The tasks where I gave Claude Opus 5 a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.
Voxelcraft
Game
Claude Opus 5 8.4
·
Grok 4.6 1.5
(+6.9)
· polished voxel sandbox
What I saw: Strong terrain generation with varied blocks, trees, and a genuine day/night cycle (screenshot shows night phase with dimmed lighting and 3 active mobs), plus a clean HUD, hotbar, and place/break/combat mechanics. Loses a hair for the visually murky dark-block artifact center-fra…
Skyrim
Game
Claude Opus 5 8.2
·
Grok 4.6 1.5
(+6.7)
What I saw: Strong atmospheric first-person build with polished HUD (compass, sneak/kills chips, three meters), gorgeous dusk skybox, layered snow-capped mountains, pines, winding path and convincing held sword+shield viewmodel. An enemy is visible mid-field, but with kills at 0 and combat o…
Nordiccrypt
Game
Claude Opus 5 8.0
·
Grok 4.6 3.0
(+5.0)
What I saw: Strong first-person crypt crawler with a clear enemy (Crypt Shade with health bar) approaching, first-person axe viewmodel, HUD with health/vigor/kills/minimap, and a torch-lit chandelier — combat is present and shippable. Weak points: the scene reads as dim beige boxes rather th…
Dogfight
Game
Claude Opus 5 8.4
·
Grok 4.6 4.8
(+3.6)
· polished flight sim
What I saw: Gorgeous low-poly jet, layered HUD, radar with 4 bogeys, gradient sky and terrain with pull-up warning all render cleanly and read as a real dogfight sim; slightly short of top since the screenshot shows enemies only as radar dots rather than visible in-air combat/tracers, and sc…
Flightsim
Game
Claude Opus 5 8.6
·
Grok 4.6 5.0
(+3.6)
· combat flight sim
What I saw: Gorgeous low-poly terrain with detailed aircraft, hangar, runway markings, and a complete pro-grade HUD (airspeed tape, ADI attitude ball, VS, radar alt, throttle) plus combat with hostiles/kills/score — exceeding a plain flight sim. Slightly chaotic mid-collision moment (hull at…
Where Grok 4.6 beat Claude Opus 5
The tasks where I gave Grok 4.6 a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.
Arcade
Game
Grok 4.6 8.7
·
Claude Opus 5 6.5
(+2.2)
· 3D breakout cityscape
What I saw: Strong: a fully-rendered 3D breakout with atmospheric cityscape, glowing rails, detailed paddle craft, brick grid, active ball with particle trail, and polished HUD (core/velocity/lives/score/wave). Weak: perspective makes the brick field feel small and the 3D angle slightly comp…
Neonblaster
Game
Grok 4.6 8.0
·
Claude Opus 5 6.8
(+1.2)
What I saw: Space shooter with a multi-part player ship (glowing engine nacelles, wing pylons), a formation of pink-and-gold enemy fighters, an asteroid field, tracer streaks, an energy-ring gate and a working radar. Played 12s: HULL INTEGRITY dropped 100 to 064 because the enemies actually …
Twilightvale
Game
Grok 4.6 7.4
·
Claude Opus 5 7.3
(+0.1)
What I saw: Moody twilight forest with a caped knight carrying a visible sword, purple crystal enemies that close on you, pines, rocks and a live minimap. Played 20s: SHARDS went 0/7 to 1/7, SCORE to 00310 and VIT fell 100 to 006 because the enemies deal damage. Real combat loop, just very p…
Strengths & weaknesses I logged
Claude Opus 5
Strengths
- Frontier-class coding + agentic reasoning (Claude 5 family)
- 1M-token context — reads an entire codebase in one call
- Benched here with skill-infused game prompts the day of release
Trade-offs
- Premium pricing ($5/$25 per M) — route the everyday 90% to cheaper lanes
- Reasoning-by-default eats token budgets unless tuned per call
Grok 4.6
Strengths
- Ties GPT-5.6 Sol at 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, one point behind Claude Fable 5 Max
- Trained with agentic reinforcement learning for long-running agents, so it holds a spec across a 40KB single-file build
- Fixes its own broken builds: handed the exact runtime error, it repaired 4 of 4 failed games on the first retry
- Very strong arcade and shooter output - the synthwave racer and the Doom raycaster are top-tier one-shots
Trade-offs
- Flight models are its weak spot: both the flight sim and the dogfight shipped unflyable on the first pass
- Two of sixteen game builds died on a hard error (a duplicate identifier and a bad computeBoundingSphere call)
- Worlds are lit and composed but usually untextured, so terrain reads as flat coloured planes
Pricing & context — the spec sheet
| Spec | Claude Opus 5 | Grok 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Anthropic | xAI |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | 500,000 tokens |
| Price | $5 / $25 per M | $2 in / $6 out per M tokens |
| Pricing detail | Anthropic's brand-new flagship — the first Opus of the Claude 5 family, with a 1M-token context window. Benched via API the day it dropped; game tasks use our skill-infused AAA build prompts. | xAI's August 2026 flagship. $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on the standard tier (the Fast tier is double), which is roughly half what the other frontier models charge for the same Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 61. |
| Release | 2026-07 | 2026-08 |
| Bench coverage | 50/50 scored · avg 8.27/10 | 20/20 scored · avg 5.95/10 |
The verdict — which should you pick?
Across 20 scored shared tasks, Claude Opus 5 averaged 8.05/10, beating Grok 4.6's 5.95/10 by 2.10 points. Pick Claude Opus 5 when the build has to ship on the first prompt and you can afford the trade-offs in the comparison below.
If you only run one of these inside your stack, the head-to-head average above is the call. If you can run both, my honest play is to wire Claude Opus 5 and Grok 4.6 both into the Agent Operating System and dispatch each from the kanban by task type — hardest agentic builds → Claude Opus 5, high-volume agent work where the per-token bill decides what you can afford to run → Grok 4.6. That's the same setup I run for the 4,000+ founders inside the AI Profit Boardroom.
FAQ — Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.6
Which is better, Claude Opus 5 or Grok 4.6?
On Goldie Bench, Claude Opus 5 averages 8.05/10 across the shared tasks, with 13 gold, 7 silver, 5 bronze overall. Grok 4.6 averages 5.95/10, with 1 gold, 0 silver, 0 bronze. Claude Opus 5 wins the head-to-head 17–3.
How much does Claude Opus 5 cost vs Grok 4.6?
Claude Opus 5: Anthropic's brand-new flagship — the first Opus of the Claude 5 family, with a 1M-token context window. Benched via API the day it dropped; game tasks use our skill-infused AAA build prompts. Grok 4.6: xAI's August 2026 flagship. $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on the standard tier (the Fast tier is double), which is roughly half what the other frontier models charge for the same Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 61.
What's the context window for Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.6?
Claude Opus 5 has a 1,000,000 tokens context window. Grok 4.6 has a 500,000 tokens context window.
When should I pick Claude Opus 5 over Grok 4.6?
Pick Claude Opus 5 for: Hardest agentic builds; Whole-repo reasoning; Frontier one-shots. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Premium pricing ($5/$25 per M) — route the everyday 90% to cheaper lanes; Reasoning-by-default eats token budgets unless tuned per call.
When should I pick Grok 4.6 over Claude Opus 5?
Pick Grok 4.6 for: High-volume agent work where the per-token bill decides what you can afford to run; Arcade, shooter and driving builds in one shot; Self-repair loops - it is unusually good at fixing a build when you hand it the real error. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Flight models are its weak spot: both the flight sim and the dogfight shipped unflyable on the first pass; Two of sixteen game builds died on a hard error (a duplicate identifier and a bad computeBoundingSphere call); Worlds are lit and composed but usually untextured, so terrain reads as flat coloured planes.
How does Goldie Bench score Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.6?
Every demo on this page was built by Julian Goldie inside the Agent Operating System — same fixed prompt for both models, one shot, single HTML file out. Each result gets a 0–10 score on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The highest score on each task gets gold; second gets silver; third gets bronze. See methodology for full provenance.
Related comparisons
Other head-to-heads using the same scoring system:
Claude Opus 5 vs Fusion Grok 4.6 vs Fusion Claude Opus 5 vs Hermes MoA Grok 4.6 vs Hermes MoA Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol Grok 4.6 vs GPT-5.6 Sol Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Fable 5 Grok 4.6 vs Claude Fable 5Full model pages: Claude Opus 5 · Grok 4.6 · back to the leaderboard
The same stack Julian uses
Run this stack yourself.
Every demo on this bench was built inside the Agent Operating System — one prompt, one shot, single HTML file out. The Agent OS, the prompts, the templates, the weekly walkthroughs and 4,000+ founders shipping with it every day all live inside the AI Profit Boardroom.
4,000+founders
258documented wins
38countries
$59/momonthly