Grok 4.6, released Wednesday by Elon Musk's SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), scored 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, which matches OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Max and trails only Anthropic's leading models, according to independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis.
Grok charges $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Sol Max costs $5 and $30. The leap could turn a model race Grok was losing on intelligence into a price war.
Grok Goes From Laggard to Frontier
Grok 4.6 gained five points over Grok 4.5 in little more than a month, and 23 points over Grok 4.3, according to Artificial Analysis. The firm said the release returns SpaceX's AI unit to the frontier, with particularly strong performance on agentic work rather than static reasoning.
Anthropic still leads the overall index. In June, Benzinga reported that for SpaceX bulls to be right, Grok needed to climb from laggard to leader.
Polymarket now gives xAI a 9% chance of having the best AI model by the end of the year, up from around 3% before the release of its latest version. The market resolves using Arena's leaderboard rather than the Artificial Analysis index.
Anthropic is in first with 67%. Google has fallen to fourth, behind xAI for the first time this year, with 6%.
Google Scrambles as the Frontier Moves
Grok's acceleration comes as one of its biggest rivals is discovering how hard it is simply to stay at the frontier. Reuters reported Wednesday that Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) co-founder Sergey Brin has been urging key AI staff to go all in on Gemini.
Gemini briefly reached the frontier last November but soon slipped behind. According to the report, Google delayed its next flagship model by two months after weak internal coding results, while compute shortages, internal disputes and bureaucracy have slowed progress.
Why SpaceX Investors Care
Morgan Stanley said this week that investors may be undervaluing SpaceX's AI business. The bank said further signs of Grok gaining traction through Cursor could help close that valuation gap, and put its bull case for SpaceX shares at $600.
Grok 4.6 is now available through Cursor and SpaceX's API.