Grok 4.6 Shows Up in GitHub Copilot, Two Days After Launch
xAI's newest model is now selectable in Copilot across eight places developers work, from VS Code and Xcode to the command line. The speed of these hand-offs says something about how the market works now.
GitHub added Grok 4.6 to Copilot yesterday, two days after xAI released the model. It appears in Copilot’s model picker across eight surfaces: VS Code, Visual Studio, the Copilot command line tool, the Copilot cloud agent, the Copilot app, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode and Eclipse. The rollout covers the Pro, Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise plans.
Grok 4.6 launched on 12 August, priced at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 6 dollars per million output tokens, the same as Grok 4.5, and matching GPT-5.6 Sol Max on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Tokens are the chunks of text models read and write, roughly three quarters of a word each, and that pricing puts Grok near the cheap end of the frontier group. xAI positions the model for agentic coding, meaning tasks where the assistant runs for a while on its own, edits several files, runs tests and comes back with a result rather than a snippet.
Two days from launch to appearing inside Microsoft’s coding product is the part worth noticing. Copilot started as a single-model product and is now a model marketplace, with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI models sitting side by side in the same dropdown. That is good for developers and awkward for the labs: if switching model is a click, the thing you are actually selling is this month’s benchmark position and price, not a locked-in customer. It also explains the pace of releases this summer.
A fair caveat on model pickers: the differences between frontier models on everyday tasks are smaller than the launch posts suggest. Where they show up is on long, messy jobs, and there the right choice depends on your codebase, not on a leaderboard. Grok 4.6 is also available outside Copilot through xAI’s API, Cursor, Grok Build, and partners including OpenRouter, Vercel and Cloudflare.
What this means for you: if you already pay for Copilot, this costs nothing extra and is worth ten minutes. Take a task you recently gave to your usual model, run it again with Grok 4.6, and compare on your own code rather than on someone’s chart. If you do not write software, the takeaway is the market shape: assistants are becoming interchangeable parts inside the tools you already use, which over time should push prices down and make switching cheap. That is a quietly good development for buyers.
Sources
Source: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-08-14-grok-4-6-is-now-available-in-github-copilot/
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