What's new in Grok 4.6 from 500K context to pricing

Grok 4.6, released by xAI (branded here as SpaceXAI) on August 12, 2026, builds on Grok 4.5 with a focus on long-running agentic tasks, coding, and visual/interactive work. It keeps the 500K token context window and ships as grok-4.6, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens under 200K tokens, doubling to $4/$12 above that threshold. Vendor benchmarks show consistent gains over Grok 4.5 (e.g., Terminal-Bench v3.0 up from 15.7% to 26%) and rough parity with GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 Max on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, though it trails on terminal-heavy autonomy benchmarks. The model is available via Cursor, Grok Build, the xAI API, and partners like OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare, with guidance on when to reach for it and how to manage context costs, plus a walkthrough for wiring it into Appwrite's backend via MCP.