xAI has launched Grok 4.6, the newest version of its flagship model. Elon Musk said in a post on X on Aug. 12 that Grok 4.6 is “smarter, faster, and insanely cost-effective,” while xAI’s official account described it as a major upgrade from Grok 4.5 with no change in price.
Benchmark claims focus on higher performance at the same price
The release is centered on value. Based on benchmark data published by xAI, Grok 4.6 scored 61 on the AA Intelligence Index, matching OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. xAI also said the model outperformed GPT-5.6 Sol on CursorBench, FrontierCode, and AA-Briefcase. Musk added that the model posted an ELO score of 1753.
Pricing remains the same as Grok 4.5 at roughly $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. xAI said Grok 4.6 delivers performance around the level of Fable 5 Max while costing about 15% as much. It also said pricing is about 80% lower for input tokens and about 88% lower for output tokens than rival frontier models. Those figures were published by xAI, and the article noted that third-party validation is still needed.
Base model stays the same, with gains coming from post-training
On the technical side, Grok 4.6 uses the same 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 base model as Grok 4.5. The main improvements come from post-training, including supervised fine-tuning, or SFT, and reinforcement learning, or RL.
In other words, xAI did not swap in a new foundation model for this release. The update instead focuses on training the same model more effectively for practical use.
Available through API, app, website, and X subscriptions
Grok 4.6 is now available through the xAI API, the Grok App, grok.com, and X’s Premium+ and SuperGrok subscription plans.
ABMedia said Chain News had previously reported that xAI had rolled out the “AI coworker” Grok Bot and had signaled that Grok 4.6 would arrive this week. The launch has now been completed. For developers, the article said xAI is still pressing OpenAI and Anthropic with a pricing strategy aimed at winning market share.