xAI's Grok 4.1 Fast Debuts with 98% Price Reduction, Setting New Price-Performance Benchmark

xAI has officially launched Grok 4.1 Fast, an advanced large language model designed to offer exceptional performance at a significantly reduced cost. The model, which features a 2-million-token context window and enhanced agentic tool-calling capabilities, is positioned as a "beast in terms of price-performance ratio," according to a recent social media post by user Chubby♨️. This release marks a strategic move by xAI to provide a highly efficient and cost-effective solution for enterprise and developer use cases.

Grok 4.1 Fast is specifically engineered for real-world applications such as customer support and deep research, excelling in complex agentic tasks. It has demonstrated strong performance across various benchmarks, including the LMArena's Text Arena, where Grok 4.1 Thinking holds the top position. The model also boasts a significantly reduced hallucination rate, cutting it in half compared to its predecessor, Grok 4 Fast, while maintaining comparable performance on factuality scores.

A key highlight of Grok 4.1 Fast is its remarkable cost efficiency. Building on the advancements of Grok 4 Fast, which achieved a 98% reduction in price for similar performance by using 40% fewer "thinking tokens," Grok 4.1 Fast continues this trend of optimizing for speed and cost. Its pricing structure is set at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, with cached inputs at an even lower $0.05 per million tokens. For a limited promotional period, Grok 4.1 Fast is available for free on OpenRouter, alongside the free xAI Agent Tools API.

The launch also includes the Agent Tools API, a powerful suite enabling Grok 4.1 Fast to operate as a fully autonomous agent with access to real-time X data, web search, and code execution. This integration allows developers to build production-grade agents that specialize in tool calling and agentic search, further enhancing the model's utility. xAI's focus on balancing frontier tool-calling performance with blazing-fast inference and cost-effectiveness aims to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities for a broader range of users and businesses.