xAI's Grok 4.6 nears GPT-5.6, costs 60% less

xAI's Grok 4.6 scored 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tying OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and trailing only Anthropic's Claude Opus 5. On agentic tasks it completed workflows in about 53 steps versus Claude Opus 5's 103, while pricing more than 60% below Claude Opus 5.

Why it matters: This narrows the gap between xAI and the two leaders on both capability and cost, intensifying price competition among frontier models. If Grok's step-efficiency advantage holds up outside benchmarks, it could make xAI attractive for agentic and tool-use workloads where cost per task matters more than raw score.