SpaceX's AI unit, now branded SpaceXAI, has released Grok 4.6, and the independent benchmark firm Artificial Analysis says it scores 61 points on its Intelligence Index, tying OpenAI's newest flagship model and sitting just behind Anthropic's two top models. That is a five point jump over the previous Grok version in about five weeks, a pace of improvement that is becoming normal in this industry but still catches attention.
The number that actually matters for a business is the price. Grok 4.6 costs 2 dollars per million words of input and 6 dollars per million words of output, unchanged from its predecessor. Anthropic and OpenAI charge roughly 5 dollars for input and 25 to 30 dollars for output on their top models. That is a real gap, not a rounding error, and it means a company running thousands of AI tasks a day could cut its bill by more than half by switching.
Price per word is not the whole cost story, though. Grok 4.6 also finishes complicated, multi-step jobs, like researching a topic or working through a chunk of code, in about half the steps Claude needs. Fewer steps means less total spending per finished task, even before you compare the price per word. This is the number worth watching if your company is choosing an AI vendor for actual work rather than picking based on a headline score.
Behind the product launch is a much larger story. SpaceX bought xAI outright earlier this year in a deal that valued the combined company at 1.25 trillion dollars, and SpaceX has since gone public in one of the largest stock offerings ever. Musk has framed the whole thing as building toward AI data centers in orbit, powered by constant sunlight instead of a strained power grid on the ground. Whether or not that happens on schedule, the merger gives Grok access to a much deeper pool of money than a standalone AI startup would have, which is part of how it can afford to hold prices flat while improving the model.
There is a real reputation cost to weigh here too. Grok has a documented history of generating antisemitic content and praising extremist figures, incidents serious enough that regulators in Turkey and Poland took action against it. Musk has also told SpaceX staff that Grok will be trained on internal company data, including work created by employees, a plan with no public detail yet on consent or opt-out.
For a business shopping for AI tools, the practical read is this: the price gap between Grok and its rivals is wide enough to test seriously, especially for high-volume, repetitive tasks. But anything customer-facing or reputation-sensitive deserves a longer look at Grok's track record before it touches your brand.