Grok 4.6
xAI's frontier model for agentic coding, reasoning, and knowledge work — optimized for long-running agents and visual tasks with 500K context.
Overview
What is Grok 4.6
Grok 4.6 is xAI's most advanced AI model, released August 12, 2026, designed for complex agentic tasks like coding, reasoning, and knowledge work. It supports vision, function calling, web search, and handles up to 500K tokens of context, making it ideal for long-running, multi-step workflows.
Running it privately on Venice
On Venice, Grok 4.6 runs with full privacy — your prompts are never stored, profiled, or used for training. You get end-to-end uncensored access to its full capabilities, including reasoning and tool use, without surveillance. This means developers and enterprises can deploy intelligent agents with complete data sovereignty and zero retention.
Assessment
Strengths and limitations
- Frontier-level performance in agentic coding and knowledge work, matching GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
- Excels at long-running agents, handling complex, multi-step tasks across codebases, research, and application development.
- Supports vision, function calling, web search, and structured JSON output for real-world tool integration.
- 500K context window enables deep document analysis and extended reasoning chains.
- Optimized for code generation and terminal-level tasks with strong performance on CursorBench and SWE benchmarks.
- Proprietary model: no open weights, so no self-hosting or fine-tuning allowed.
- Pricing includes a '200K cliff': requests with 200K+ input tokens are billed at a higher rate for all tokens, increasing cost unpredictably.
- Not uncensored: content moderation policies apply, limiting certain outputs.
- No audio or video output modalities: text and image input only, text output.
Capabilities
What it supports
- Tool use / function calling
- Vision (image input)
- Reasoning
- Web search
- Code-optimized
- Structured output (JSON schema)
- Audio input
- Video input
- Multiple image inputs
- Log probabilities
Specifications
Datasheet
- Maker
- xAI
- Released
- August 12, 2026
- Architecture
- Transformer-based
- Parameters
- Not publicly disclosed
- Open/closed
- Closed — proprietary
- Context window
- 500K tokens
- Max output
- 200K tokens
- Capabilities
- Vision, Function calling, Reasoning, Web search, Code-optimized
- Privacy on Venice
- Private — zero retention
- Available on Venice since
- Aug 2026
- License
- Proprietary
API
Call it from your code
Venice exposes an OpenAI-compatible API. Point your base URL at Venice and pass the model id.
curl https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "grok-4-6",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum tunneling simply." }]
}'Pricing
What it costs on Venice
Billed per token on Venice: $2.27 per 1M input tokens and $6.80 per 1M output tokens.
New Venice accounts include a free daily allowance and 500 welcome credits — no credit card required.
Alternatives
How it compares
| Model | Best for | Max context | Input price / 1M | Open weights | Price advantage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.6 | Balances high intelligence with moderate pricing, ideal for agentic workflows under 200K tokens. | 500K tokens | $2.27 in · $6.80 out / 1M | No | Cost-effective for mid-length prompts |
| Claude Fable 5 | Top-tier performance but at a significantly higher price point than Grok 4.6. | 1M tokens | $12 in · $60 out / 1M | No | Higher cost |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | More affordable than Fable but still pricier than Grok 4.6 for similar workloads. | 1M tokens | $3.60 in · $18 out / 1M | No | More expensive input |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 | Massively cheaper and open-weight, but less capable on complex agentic tasks. | 1M tokens | $0.17 in · $0.35 out / 1M | Yes | Much cheaper |
| GLM 5.1 | Open and private, but smaller context and lower reasoning capability than Grok 4.6. | 200K tokens | $1.10 in · $4.15 out / 1M | Yes | Cheaper input |
Balances high intelligence with moderate pricing, ideal for agentic workflows under 200K tokens.
Use cases
What it is good for
- 01Automating software development workflows with agent-based coding and debugging.
- 02Long-form research and analysis across large document sets or code repositories.
- 03Enterprise knowledge assistants that pull from internal data via function calling.
- 04Interactive visual reasoning tasks combining image input and web search.
- 05High-stakes decision support requiring structured, auditable outputs in JSON.
Prompting
Getting better results
Use explicit step-by-step reasoning prompts to leverage its agentic strengths.
Break complex tasks into stages with clear objectives to maximize accuracy.
Include image context when relevant — it can analyze charts, diagrams, and screenshots.
Use web search capability to ground responses in up-to-date information.
Leverage function calling for real-time data retrieval or system actions.
Version history
Immediate predecessor, slightly less capable in agentic reasoning.
Current — enhanced for long-running agents and visual tasks.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Grok 4.6 is xAI's frontier AI model, released on August 12, 2026, optimized for agentic coding, reasoning, and knowledge work. It supports vision, function calling, web search, and handles up to 500K tokens of context for complex, multi-step tasks.
On Venice, Grok 4.6 costs $2.27 per 1M input tokens and $6.80 per 1M output tokens. Cached input is $0.57 per 1M tokens. Pricing jumps if prompts exceed 200K tokens, so efficiency matters.
No. Grok 4.6 is a proprietary model developed by xAI. It is not open source or freely available for self-hosting. You can access it via API on platforms like Venice.
Yes. Grok 4.6 supports function calling and structured JSON output, enabling integration with external tools, APIs, and databases for real-world agent workflows.
Grok 4.6 has a 500,000-token context window, allowing it to process and reason over extremely long documents, codebases, or multi-turn conversations.
Yes. Grok 4.6 accepts image inputs and can analyze charts, diagrams, screenshots, and other visual content as part of its multimodal reasoning capabilities.
Claude Fable 5 leads slightly in overall benchmarks, but Grok 4.6 offers comparable intelligence at a fraction of the cost, making it more practical for production agentic workloads.
No. Grok 4.6 applies content moderation policies and is not fully uncensored. However, on Venice, it runs with zero retention and private processing, ensuring your data remains sovereign.
Run Grok 4.6 privately
No prompt logging. No data used for training.