Tuesday, 18 August 2026 No. 2 Updated
THE VISSION
The daily record of artificial intelligence

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Frontier models

xAI ships Grok 4.6, matching GPT-5.6 Sol on Artificial Analysis's intelligence index

The update keeps Grok 4.5's base model and 500,000-token context, spending the gains on longer training for agentic and knowledge-work tasks rather than a larger model.

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The short version
  • xAI released Grok 4.6, a post-training update to Grok 4.5 focused on long-running agentic tasks and knowledge work, at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
  • The model matches GPT-5.6 Sol at a score of 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, and xAI reports it leads that model on several knowledge-work benchmarks, including CursorBench 3.2 at 69.9%.
  • The company says the gains came from a longer supplemental training run and reinforcement learning in agentic environments, not a larger base model.

The update keeps Grok 4.5's base model and 500,000-token context, spending the gains on longer training for agentic and knowledge-work tasks rather than a larger model.

The story so far · Grok 4.6, from launch to leak
  1. 18 Aug 2026 xAI ships Grok 4.6, matching GPT-5.6 Sol on Artificial Analysis's intelligence index
  2. 20 Aug 2026 Grok 4.6 reaches Amazon Bedrock with a 500K context window and tiered pricing
  3. 21 Aug 2026 Encrypted instructions on a web page make Grok hand over a user's chat history