SpaceXAI debuts Grok 4.6, overtaking Kimi K3's performance and matching GPT-5.6 Sol for world's third best on Artificial Analysis

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Elon Musk's company SpaceXAI, formerly known as xAI, has released Grok 4.6, its latest frontier AI model, with a focus on long-running agents, coding and knowledge work — and a pricing strategy designed to make those workloads cheaper to run. The model scores 61 on the third-party Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, surpassing the popular open weights Chinese model from Moonshot, Kimi K3, and tying rival OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Max and improving five points over Grok 4.5 High. Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5 occupy the number one and two spots, respectively. More consequential for enterprises evaluating AI agents, Grok 4.6 posts sizable gains over its predecessor across coding, terminal, knowledge-work and agent benchmarks while retaining an application programming interface (API) price starting at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, making it a mid-priced frontier model comparing leading options that are both proprietary and open source, globally, according to VentureBeat's analysis. Model Input ($/1M) Output ($/1M) Total ($/1M) Source Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor $0.10 $0.20 $0.30 Meta MiMo-V2.5 Flash $0.10 $0.30 $0.40 Xiaomi deepseek-v4-flash $0.14 $0.28 $0.42 DeepSeek deepseek-v4-pro $0.435 $0.87 $1.305 DeepSeek GPT-5.6 Luna $0.20 $1.20 $1.40 OpenAI MiniMax-M3 $0.30 $1.20 $1.50 MiniMax LongCat-2.0 — limited-time promo $0.30 $1.20 $1.50 LongCat MiMo-V2.5 $0.40 $2.00 $2.40 Xiaomi LongCat-2.0 — standard $0.75 $2.95 $3.70 LongCat MiMo-V2.5 Pro (≤256K) $1.00 $3.00 $4.00 Xiaomi Muse Spark 1.1 / 1.2 $1.25 $4.25 $5.50 Meta GLM-5.2 $1.40 $4.40 $5.80 Z.ai Grok 4.6 — 256K) $2.00 $6.00 $8.00 Xiaomi Qwen3.8-Max $2.00 $6.00 $8.00 QwenCloud Gemini 3.6 Flash $1.50 $7.50 $9.00 Google GPT-5.6 Terra $2.00 $12.00 $14.00 OpenAI Grok 4.6 — ≥200K prompt tokens $4.00 $12.00 $16.00 xAI GPT-5.4 $2.50 $15.00 $17.50 OpenAI Kimi K3 $3.00 $15.00 $18.00 Moonshot AI Claude Opus 5 $5.00 $25.00 $30.00 Anthropic Sakana Fugu Ultra (≤272K) $5.00 $30.00 $35.00 Sakana AI GPT-5.6 Sol — Standard mode $5.00 $30.00 $35.00 OpenAI Claude Fable 5 / Claude Mythos 5 $10.00 $50.00 $60.00 Anthropic GPT-5.6 Sol — Fast mode $10.00 $60.00 $70.00 OpenAI Still, that's less than half of what GPT-5.6 Sol costs over OpenAI's API in standard mode. SpaceXAI says Grok 4.6 is available today in Grok Build, SpaceXAI's answer to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, which is available starting in the $30 per month SuperGrok plan. It's also available in SpaceX's recent acquisition of the AI coding startup Cursor, and from partners including OpenRouter, Vercel and Cloudflare. SpaceXAI is providing twice the included usage for Grok 4.6 in Cursor and Grok Build during the first week. The release arrives only weeks after Grok 4.5, which SpaceXAI launched in July as a model targeting coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work, and one day after the launch of Grok Bot, a new system for assigning AI agents to complete designated tasks as virtual employees. The bigger change is…