Grok 4.6: API Pricing, 500K Context, and What Changed

What changed from Grok 4.5

Grok 4.6 keeps the same broad developer shape—text and image input, configurable reasoning, function calling, and structured output—while positioning the endpoint as xAI’s current flagship for coding and agents. The 500K context window is large enough for many repositories and document workflows without claiming a universal long-context advantage.

Price and cached input

The published standard rates are $2 per million input tokens, $0.50 per million cached input tokens, and $6 per million output tokens. The >200K-context pricing treatment is a separate verification point: keep it visible as a caveat until the pricing page clearly defines how that threshold is billed.

Who should use it—and who should wait

Use Grok 4.6 when configurable reasoning and tool use matter and your team can run a provider-specific regression suite. Do not switch blind if your traffic routinely crosses 200K input tokens, depends on a particular region, or assumes 4.5’s exact output style.

Migration checklist and unknowns

Pin grok-4.6, replay tool-call fixtures, compare cached and uncached traffic separately, and record the context size for every cost sample. All AI Ask has not published a controlled first-party quality or latency verdict for this release; provider positioning is labeled as such.

Explore the canonical data

Test it yourself

Run the same prompt across grok 4.6, claude sonnet 5, gemini 3.7 flash in one workspace.

FAQ

Sources

• xAI Grok 4.6 documentation
• xAI model documentation
• All AI Ask Grok 4.6 model page