❯ xAI Releases Grok 4.6, Intelligence Index Ties GPT-5.6 Sol, Price Steady at $2

TIExAI released Grok 4.6, scoring 61 on the intelligence index in third-party evaluator Artificial Analysis’s tests, tying OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and sitting just 1 point behind leader Claude Fable 5. The official pricing page shows pricing identical to the previous Grok 4.5: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.

GAINIn that same evaluation, the previously released Grok 4.5 had long been treated as a value option rather than a frontier player in this tier. This round’s progress is concentrated in agentic tasks: DeepSWE rose 11.9 percentage points, Terminal-Bench up 10.3 points, APEX-Agents up 10.4 points, and the composite index gained 5 points. xAI says it leads Sol on CursorBench, FrontierCode, and AA-Briefcase. It is available at launch on Cursor, Grok Build, API, as well as OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare.

SPREADTypical quotes for same-tier models run about twice that figure — against Fable 5’s $10 input / $50 output, Grok 4.6 scores 98% as high on the intelligence index while coming in about 8x cheaper on the output side. DeepSeek was also cutting prices the same day; together these point to one conclusion: the frontier tier’s price band is collapsing.

REPRICETeams building long-chain agents need to recalculate the per-task cost: approaches previously axed for excessive inference overhead may no longer be ruled out when rerun at the $6 output price. The real squeeze falls on vendors priced a tier up — premiums must be justified by capability gaps, and that gap now sits at just 1 point.

▪ SIGNALIntelligence gap of 1 point, price gap of 8x — the high-priced tier needs a new justification.