Grok 4.6, released August 12, 2026 by SpaceXAI (formerly xAI), is the company's latest frontier reasoning model. Built on the same 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 foundation as Grok 4.5, it delivers its gains through a heavily reworked post-training pipeline rather than raw scale, shifting focus from raw intelligence to long-running agents and interactive, visual work — multi-step research, codebase navigation, and turning product ideas into polished applications.
Model Specifications
| Specification | Grok 4.6 |
|---|---|
| Parameters | 1.5T (V9 foundation) |
| Context window | 500,000 tokens |
| Modality | Text + image input; text output |
| Reasoning effort | low, medium, high (default), xhigh |
| API compatibility | OpenAI SDK-compatible (Responses + Chat Completions) |
| Availability | Cursor, Grok Build, API, OpenRouter, Vercel, Cloudflare |
| License | Closed weights |
What's New vs Grok 4.5
- Post-training overhaul: Same 1.5T V9 base, but significantly improved SFT and reinforcement learning, trained on agentic RL tasks spanning knowledge work, general coding, web development, CAD, and kernel optimization.
- Self-verification behavior: The model increasingly tests and verifies its own outputs before moving forward across multi-step tasks.
- Stronger first attempts at visual and interactive projects — it can establish an application's structure and visual language from a product idea before refining.
- Longer supplemental training run using model-generated reasoning data and engineering material.
Benchmark Highlights (self-reported)
- AA Intelligence Index: 61 (up from 56 on Grok 4.5)
- APEX-Agents: 57.5% (up from 47.1%)
- DeepSWE v1.1: 65.9% (up from 54%)
- CursorBench v3.2: 69.9% (up from 66.7%)
- Harvey LAB (Vals): 15.8%, the best professional/legal work score in its comparison set
- Known weakness: Terminal-Bench v3.0 at 26% trails rivals (34-35%), a genuine gap in real terminal work
Pricing
| Tier | Input / 1M tokens | Cached input / 1M tokens | Output / 1M tokens |
|---|---|---|---|
| < 200K prompt tokens | $2.00 | $0.50 | $6.00 |
| ≥ 200K prompt tokens | $4.00 | $1.00 | $12.00 |
| Fast variant | 2× standard | 2× standard | 2× standard |
Consumer plans include a limited free tier, SuperGrok at $30/month, SuperGrok Plus at $100/month, and SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month. At $2/$6 per million tokens, Grok 4.6 is roughly half the price of comparable frontier models like Claude Opus 5 ($5/$25) and GPT-5.6 Sol ($5/$30).
Notes
All benchmarks are self-reported by SpaceXAI with no independent replication yet. The 1.5T parameter count comes from Elon Musk's X posts rather than a formal model card. A successor, Grok 4.7 (2.1T parameters), is expected in late August or early September 2026.
Conclusion
Grok 4.6 shows that xAI's competitive edge now lies in agentic training and interactive work rather than model scale alone. For agent builders and heavy coding users, it offers frontier-level capabilities at roughly half the API cost of its main competitors — with real-time X data access remaining its signature differentiator.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!
Related Tools
Grok
x.ai
xAI's frontier multimodal AI model with real-time X data access, 1M token context, Aurora image generation, and industry-leading reasoning capabilities.
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813
www.deepseek.com
DeepSeek's flagship 1.6T MoE model with 49B active parameters, 1M-token context, MIT open weights, and world-leading coding scores at a fraction of closed-model prices.
Claude Opus 5
www.anthropic.com/claude/opus
Anthropic's frontier Opus model with 1M-token context and effort-controlled reasoning, near-Fable-5 intelligence at Opus-4.8 pricing for agents and coding.
Related Insights
After I Connected Obsidian to OpenClaw, It Started Helping Me Make Decisions
Once Obsidian stopped being just a place to store notes and started working with OpenClaw, it began helping me organize context, connect information, and improve real decisions.
Stop Cramming AI Assistants into Chat Boxes: Clawdbot Picked the Wrong Battlefield
Clawdbot is convenient, but putting it inside Slack or Discord was the wrong design choice from day one. Chat tools are not for operating tasks, and AI isn't for chatting.
The Twilight of Low-Code Platforms: Why Claude Agent SDK Will Make Dify History
A deep dive from first principles of large language models on why Claude Agent SDK will replace Dify. Exploring why describing processes in natural language is more aligned with human primitive behavior patterns, and why this is the inevitable choice in the AI era.