Grok 4.6 gains 5 points over Grok 4.5 on the Intelligence Index just over one month after its release, or +23 points compared to Grok 4.3. This brings SpaceXAI back to the intelligence frontier alongside OpenAI, behind only Anthropic.
Key takeaways:➤ Grok 4.6 joins the frontier of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: It scores 61, in line with GPT-5.6 Sol (max), behind Claude Opus 5 (max, 63) and Claude Fable 5 (max with fallback, 62), and just ahead of Kimi K3
➤ Strong agentic performance: Grok 4.6 achieves a GDPval-AA v2 Elo of 1753, behind only Claude Opus 5 and with overlapping confidence intervals with Claude Fable 5 and Qwen3.8 Max. It scores 50.7% on 𝜏³-Banking, among the top two scores alongside Qwen3.8 Max (51.3%), and 88.4% on Terminal-Bench v2.1, in line with the leading models
➤ Frontier-level intelligence at lower cost: Headline pricing is unchanged from Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 per 1M input/output tokens, 60%+ below Claude Opus 5 ($5/$25) and GPT-5.6 Sol ($5/$30). It cost $0.84 per task, the same as Kimi K3 with slightly higher intelligence, placing it on the Intelligence vs. Cost per Task Pareto frontier
➤ Grok 4.6 sits at Fable 5-tier on AA-Briefcase, our private benchmark of long-horizon agentic knowledge work tasks, with an Elo of 1577 – behind the Claude Opus 5 family. It is notably turn-efficient, completing tasks in ~53 turns and ~0.5B input tokens on average vs. ~103 turns and ~2.0B input tokens for Claude Opus 5 (max)
Other model details:➤ Context window of 500k tokens (unchanged from Grok 4.5)
➤ Pricing of $2/$6 per 1M tokens of input/output; cache hits discounted to $0.5 per 1M tokens, an increase over Grok 4.5’s $0.3 per 1M tokens for cache hits
Grok 4.6’s strongest results are on agentic work rather than static reasoning. On GDPval-AA v2, our leading measure of real-world agentic knowledge work, it scores an Elo of 1753 – behind only Claude Opus 5, and statistically indistinguishable from Claude Fable 5 and Qwen3.8 Max given overlapping confidence intervals.
The pattern holds across task types. 𝜏³-Banking (50.7%) tests multi-turn customer service with tool use and places Grok 4.6 in the top two, while Terminal-Bench v2.1 (88.4%) puts it level with the leaders on terminal-based software tasks. Few models are simultaneously competitive across knowledge work, customer service and terminal use; combined with its pricing, this places Grok 4.6 on the cost vs. performance Pareto frontier for every agentic evaluation in the Intelligence Index.
Holding headline pricing flat across a generation is unusual at the frontier, where intelligence gains have typically been accompanied by price increases. Grok 4.6 delivers a 5-point Intelligence Index gain at unchanged $2/$6 pricing, and our measured cost per task of $0.84 reflects both that pricing and reasonable token efficiency.
The comparison that matters for buyers is against the models scoring within two points of it: Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25 and GPT-5.6 Sol at $5/$30. Grok 4.6 offers effectively the same Intelligence Index score as GPT-5.6 Sol at a fraction of the output token price, which is the dimension that dominates cost in reasoning-heavy workloads.
Grok 4.6 debuts on AA-Briefcase, our private benchmark of long-horizon agentic knowledge work tasks, with an Elo of 1577. This places it at Fable 5-tier, behind the Claude Opus 5 family, with consistently strong performance across rubric grading, presentation quality and analytical quality rather than strength in one dimension offsetting weakness in another.