SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 on Wednesday, August 12. The company says the model reaches frontier-level performance from OpenAI and Anthropic while charging less. Google followed one day later with its own lower-priced model.

Grok 4.6 Pricing and Benchmark Claims

Grok 4.6 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. That price sits at roughly one-fourth the cost of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5. SpaceXAI states the model delivers competitive results on key benchmarks.

On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, SpaceXAI reports that Grok 4.6 scored on par with OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. Independent reviewers place it third, behind Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Opus 5. MarketWatch noted a five-point gain over the previous version, Grok 4.5, on the same index.

How Grok 4.6 Was Built and What It Can Do

The model is not a fresh pre-training run. It is a post-training and reinforcement learning upgrade applied to Grok 4.5. Development focused on long-running agents, multi-step reliability, and self-verification.

SpaceXAI describes Grok 4.6 as able to research topics, plan applications, build features, and refine results across multiple rounds of feedback. The model is available right away inside Cursor and Grok Build.

Broader Price Cuts Across Frontier Models

The release fits a wider drop in frontier AI model prices. On August 13 Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. That figure is half the original price of Gemini 3.6 Flash.

OpenAI recently reduced the price of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by as much as 80 percent. Models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Alibaba have added further pressure by delivering near-frontier performance at lower cost.

Early Testing Results for Grok 4.6

Independent testing shows Grok 4.6 performs well on serious coding and agentic tasks. It trails competitors on design and visual generation work.

The model consumes more than 30 percent more tokens than Grok 4.5. As a result it runs slower and costs more per completed task even though its listed rates look competitive. Elon Musk has indicated that Grok 4.7 is expected in three to four weeks.