xAI ships Grok 4.6, aimed at long-running agents

xAI released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026, built on Grok 4.5 with a focus on long-running agents and interactive or visual work — staying with a task across many steps, and self-testing its own output on extended runs. Pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with a faster variant at double that. xAI says it matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

Why it matters

It is xAI's first release pitched primarily at sustained agentic work rather than chat quality, and it lands at roughly a third of the output-token price of the frontier tier it claims to match.

Who should care

Developers running multi-step coding or research agents and comparing cost per run

What you can do

Available now in Cursor and Grok Build, and via the xAI API and partners including OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. Grok Build and Cursor include 2x usage for the first week.