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SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026. It scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tying GPT-5.6 Sol Max and sitting just behind Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5. Pricing stayed flat from Grok 4.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, roughly a fifth of what GPT-5.6 Sol charges for output. It's live now in the xAI API, Grok Build, Cursor, and through OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare.

That's the headline every outlet is running today. It's also not the number that should decide whether you switch.

Grok 4.5 landed July 8 at a score of 54, fourth place behind Fable 5, GPT-5.5, and Opus 4.8. Grok 4.6 picks up five points in just over a month, a 23-point jump over Grok 4.3. SpaceXAI got there by having Grok 4.5 regenerate its own SFT trajectories across reasoning efforts and agent harnesses, filtering the results with model-based checks, then running a longer supplemental training pass with curated reasoning and engineering data before RL. That's Cursor's account of the training pipeline, not marketing copy, and it explains why the gains show up hardest in agentic work rather than static knowledge tests.

Context window holds at 500,000 tokens. Knowledge cutoff moved to February 1, 2026. Reasoning effort now has four settings: low, medium, high (default), and xhigh.

Every competitor piece I read this morning leads with the Intelligence Index tie against GPT-5.6 Sol. Buried three paragraphs deep in Artificial Analysis's own writeup is the number that actually decides which model wins your monthly bill: Grok 4.6 finishes long-horizon knowledge work tasks in roughly 53 turns and 0.5 billion input tokens on average. Claude Opus 5 Max needs about 103 turns and 2.0 billion input tokens for comparable quality on the same private benchmark, AA-Briefcase.

Cut the counterpoint some slack first: if you're running single-shot, accuracy-critical work where one wrong answer is expensive, the raw Intelligence Index gap still matters, and Opus 5 and Fable 5 sit two to three points above Grok 4.6 there. Turn efficiency doesn't rescue a wrong answer.

But most production AI spend isn't single-shot. It's agent loops, and agent loops bill by the token regardless of who's ahead on a nine-benchmark composite. A model that reaches a comparable result in a quarter of the input tokens carries a cost advantage that swamps the sticker price difference. That's the framing worth acting on, and it's the one none of the six pieces I checked this morning put in a headline.

Sources: Artificial Analysis's Grok 4.6 benchmark article and xAI's own developer documentation, cross-checked against Cursor's launch post. Cache pricing is worth flagging on its own: Grok 4.6's cache-hit rate rose to $0.50 per million tokens, up from Grok 4.5's $0.30. It's still cheap, but if your workload leans hard on prompt caching, the effective savings versus 4.5 are smaller than the headline pricing suggests.

Grok 4.6 is live in four places as of launch: the xAI API directly (model name grok-4.6), Grok Build (xAI's own coding agent, both CLI and API), Cursor on every plan with double included usage for the first week, and through gateway providers OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. It supports function calling, web search, X search, and code execution as native tools, and runs on both the Responses API and Chat Completions.

Cursor engineer Eric Zakariasson published a hands-on writeup the same day, rebuilding an Excalidraw-style app and an MSN Messenger clone with both 4.5 and 4.6 to compare first-pass output. His verdict on the difference: <cite index="37-1">"4.6 just has more polish, down to the separate conversation windows and the winks."</cite> That's a small, specific claim, not a benchmark score, and it lines up with Cursor's own note that Grok 4.6 produces stronger first passes on visual and interactive projects than 4.5 did.

The API swap is a one-line change: point the model name at grok-4.6 and you're running the new checkpoint, since pricing is unchanged and both the Responses API and Chat Completions still work. That makes the decision less about integration cost and more about workload fit.

Migrate now if your pipeline runs multi-turn agent loops: coding agents, research assistants that chain tool calls, customer-service bots that hold a conversation across several exchanges. The Terminal-Bench and banking-simulation scores above are exactly this category, and the turn-efficiency gap means your monthly token bill likely drops even before you touch the lower per-token price.

Hold off, or at least benchmark first, if you're running single-shot classification, extraction, or one-question-one-answer workloads where the Intelligence Index tie with GPT-5.6 Sol is the whole story and neither model's agentic strength comes into play. In that narrower case, the two- to three-point edge Opus 5 and Fable 5 hold on raw intelligence is worth pricing out against your accuracy requirements before switching anything.

One practical gotcha for anyone already on 4.5: the reasoning effort default changed behavior, not just the model weights underneath it, so a straight swap without checking your reasoning_effort setting can quietly change your cost curve on day one.

Reasoning effort defaults to "high," not "medium." If you're calling the API without setting reasoning_effort explicitly, you're paying for more thinking tokens than Grok 4.5 users defaulted to, on every request.

None of the six pieces I checked broke down access by tier, so here's what the primary sources actually confirm: the model is unrestricted by region on the API and OpenRouter (standard token billing applies everywhere OpenRouter operates), Cursor access is included on every plan tier including free, and Grok Build ships it as the default model in both the CLI and API forms. There's no separate "enterprise-only" gate on Grok 4.6 itself the way some frontier launches ship with a waitlist; the gate, if there is one, is your existing API rate limit tier.

500,000 tokens, unchanged from Grok 4.5. That's smaller than GPT-5.6 Sol's window but has stayed flat across two generations while intelligence scores climbed, so SpaceXAI is spending its parameter and training budget elsewhere.

$2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with cache hits at $0.50 per million. That is roughly a fifth of GPT-5.6 Sol's $5/$30 pricing and about 60% below Claude Opus 5's $5/$25.

Yes, on every Cursor plan as of the August 12, 2026 launch, with double included usage through the first week.

Grok 4.6 scores slightly higher on the Intelligence Index (61 versus roughly 57) at the same measured cost per task, $0.84. Kimi K3 ships open weights; Grok 4.6 does not.

Yes, text and image input with text-only output, and there's no stated output length limit.

SpaceXAI ran a longer supplemental pretraining pass with curated reasoning and engineering data, then had Grok 4.5 regenerate its own supervised fine-tuning trajectories across reasoning efforts and agent harnesses, filtering weak traces with model-based checks before the reinforcement learning stage.