Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.7

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 Sonnet 5 and Grok 4.7, side by side, on 11 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 Sonnet 5 · Reach for it in Agent OS when the job is iterative, tool-using software engineering. For one-shot visual builds, GLM 5.2 (free) beat it 4-1 here.

Grok 4.7 · Wired into the Agent OS Grok Build tab (4.7 / 4.6 / 4.5 picker, OpenRouter fallback when the CLI is signed out) and benched on twenty skill-infused game builds, each played through its full gameplay arc on a Metal GPU before the vision judge scored the played frame.

Where Claude Sonnet 5 beat Grok 4.7

The tasks where I gave Claude Sonnet 5 a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.

Where Grok 4.7 beat Claude Sonnet 5

The tasks where I gave Grok 4.7 a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.

Strengths & weaknesses I logged

Pricing & context — the spec sheet

The verdict — which should you pick?

Across 11 scored shared tasks, the averages are essentially tied — Claude Sonnet 5 6.56 vs Grok 4.7 6.86. This isn't the comparison where one wins; it's the comparison where you pick based on context, pricing, and what you're actually trying to ship.

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 Sonnet 5 and Grok 4.7 both into the Agent Operating System and dispatch each from the kanban by task type — agentic software engineering — write / run / test / fix loops on real repos → Claude Sonnet 5, one-shot arcade, driving and shooter builds where the whole game has to arrive in a single file → Grok 4.7. That's the same setup I run for the 4,000+ founders inside the AI Profit Boardroom.

FAQ — Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.7

Which is better, Claude Sonnet 5 or Grok 4.7?

On Goldie Bench, Claude Sonnet 5 averages 6.56/10 across the shared tasks, with 0 gold, 0 silver, 4 bronze overall. Grok 4.7 averages 6.86/10, with 0 gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze. Grok 4.7 wins the head-to-head 7–4.

How much does Claude Sonnet 5 cost vs Grok 4.7?

Claude Sonnet 5: $3.00 input / $15.00 output per million tokens; introductory $2.00/$10.00 through 2026-08-31. Grok 4.7: xAI's September 2026 release, priced exactly like Grok 4.6: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output on the standard tier, $4 / $12 on the Fast tier (double the output speed). OpenRouter lists the same model at $1.60 / $4.80.

What's the context window for Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.7?

Claude Sonnet 5 has a 1,000,000 tokens context window. Grok 4.7 has a 500,000 tokens context window.

When should I pick Claude Sonnet 5 over Grok 4.7?

Pick Claude Sonnet 5 for: Agentic software engineering — write / run / test / fix loops on real repos; Repo-level reasoning across a 1M-token context (Dev Team multi-agent mode); Precise logic — raycasters, physics — where one-shot open models slip. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: One-shot creative-visual builds trail GLM 5.2 here (lost 4 of 5) — no iteration to catch its own bugs; A temporal-dead-zone bug blanked its N-body orbit sim on the first shot.

When should I pick Grok 4.7 over Claude Sonnet 5?

Pick Grok 4.7 for: One-shot arcade, driving and shooter builds where the whole game has to arrive in a single file; High-volume agent work priced at half what the other frontier models charge; Grok Build inside the Agent OS: pick 4.7 in the tab and everything it writes lands in the workspace. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: 2 of 20 builds died on load or never moved when played — crypt: hud is not a function; voxelcraft: mesh.computeBoundingSphere is not a function file:///Users/j; Independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 puts it at 46, seven points behind Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 at 53; Terminal-Bench 4.0 is the weak spot xAI reports itself: 38.0% at launch.

How does Goldie Bench score Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.7?

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:

Full model pages: Claude Sonnet 5 · Grok 4.7 · back to the leaderboard