Grok 4.6 returns SpaceXAI to the intelligence frontier, matching GPT-5.6 at a fraction of the cost
SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 Scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, joining the frontier alongside GPT-5.6 Sol and behind only Anthropic's Claude models. It gains 5 points over Grok 4.5 and 23 over Grok 4.3. Grok 4.6 excels in agentic tasks, achieving top-tier scores on GDPval-AA v2, τ³-Banking, and Terminal-Bench v2.1. Pricing remains at $2/$6 per 1M tokens, 60% below rivals, with a cost per task of $0.84, placing it on the Pareto frontier. On long-horizon tasks (AA-Briefcase), it scores 1577 Elo, using half the turns and a quarter of the input tokens of Claude Opus 5.
Holding headline pricing flat across a generation is unusual at the frontier, where intelligence gains have typically been accompanied by price increases.
- mpalczewski
I've been using grok 4.5 with grok build soon after it came out and dropped claude. primarily for personal code. It communicates better. While that might not sound like a big deal it is. It doesn't give me a wall of text, tells me what I need to know and I'll make the actual decisions. It is very quick as well which means the sessions are far more interactive, I'll be steering it more. I sometimes cross check with codex and sol, but the daily driver is grok for me.
I found it has improved my productivity and output over claude where it felt like claude was giving me work to do. furthermore with the recent claude watermarking thing, I'd rather use grok or openai.
If anyone is curious download grok cli and throw a couple of prompts at it. you'll be surprised.
- satvikpendem
Cursor, since Grok 4.5, has had an incredible deal for frontier level models, their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic. Even on their lower tier plans you can use a lot tokens on their of their first party models (Grok and Composer) and not really run out comparatively. Combine them with an orchestrator and implementor type setup and it goes even further.
- dudeinhawaii
Grok is quite interesting. I run comparisons almost daily on tasks and Grok is its own beast, in a good way.
It's good to have model diversity. When I run a task across Sol, Terra, and Luna, I get variations of the same thing with diminishing quality. It makes the lineup pointless. Ditto for Anthropic. Gemini-3.6-Flash and 3.1 Pro genuinely behave differently. Opus 5 and Fable are.. cousins.
I find that when I want to test a complex creative challenge, having 4 "families" to choose from makes the experience interesting since they will excel in different areas.
Grok might implement unique lighting, Opus, elegant primitives, Sol, accurate snowfall in one pass, Gemini, silky movement. Combined, you can pick and choose best.
For what its worth, Grok always feels "messy" but finishes. Grok 4.6 though is no longer "smart and fast". It's about as fast as Sol though.
A big improvement I noticed in 4.6 was tool use for verification. Previously, Opus/Fable were the only models to consistently screenshot things that they can't directly interact with easily. Now Grok is probably right behind them, perhaps tied with Sol on propensity to verify visually. Grok 4.5 notably did not do this often.
- small_model
SpaceXAI is the only frontier model company that had its own compute/date centres and soon chip making factory, I think they will pull ahead with cheaper tokens similar intelligence and better harness/tools. Grok build is 2-5x faster than Claude Code in my opinion.
- pzo
Seems the cache read pricing almost doubled from $0.30 in Grok 4.5 to $0.50 in Grok 4.6.
In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.
- LZ_Khan
Well this makes me bullish on Gemini if its this easy to reach the frontier
- rd
I'm just wondering why they sold compute to Anthropic if they were planning on still competing in this race?
- sidcool
Grok is not the best model around, but it's decent. It gets the basic job done at a low price. I don't think it can advance frontier Math, yet.
- t1234s
Reading the SWE bickering back and fourth in this thread about Claude vs Grok reminds me of IE vs Netscape bickering way back when.
- mchusma
Nice to see SpaceX on the model frontier! They have been chasing it for a while.