Grok 4.6 available in Microsoft Foundry
- Maxime Hiez
- Foundry
- 02 Sep, 2026
Introduction
Grok 4.6, the latest frontier model from SpaceXAI, has been available in public preview in Microsoft Foundry Models since August 26, 2026. Built on SpaceXAI’s model family at the 1.5 trillion parameter scale, it does not aim to stand out on an isolated benchmark category, but to go the distance on long tasks : planning multiple steps, calling tools reliably, recovering after an error, and delivering a usable result.
A model built for long-running agents
Most models behave well on an isolated prompt. A real agent has to do something else : make progress on an extended objective, with minimal supervision, navigating between tools and recovering from intermediate failures. That is the ground Grok 4.6 targets, both for software development copilots and for multi-step business workflows.
The model is also positioned beyond code, on structured engineering tasks : computer-aided design (CAD), procedural design, and complex technical analysis.
Highlighted benchmarks
Microsoft cites three evaluations in its announcement, all provided by the model publisher :
- Terminal-Bench 3.0 : Measures the ability to carry out multi-step, terminal-based execution close to real engineering workflows.
- 3DCodeBench : Evaluates agentic procedural 3D modeling through code, so the ability to reason about technical designs and generate them.
- AA Briefcase : Artificial Analysis benchmark that evaluates agents on long knowledge-work projects, culminating in concrete deliverables such as spreadsheets, presentations, memos, financial models, or PDF files.
These results position Grok 4.6 on the workloads that produce a business deliverable, and not just an answer.
Deployment and regions
Grok 4.6 is one of the models sold by Azure, so it is not billed through the Azure Marketplace like partner models. Deployment is done from the Foundry portal catalog (ai.azure.com) by selecting the grok-4.6 model, or from the command line via Azure CLI.
The deployment characteristics are the following :
- Deployment type : Global Standard only, in all supported regions
- Context window : 200,000 tokens, input and output combined
- Maximum output : 128,000 tokens, or the remaining context budget if that is smaller
- Supported inputs : Text and image
- API : Chat Completions and Responses
- Authentication : Entra ID recommended, or an API key for the Foundry resource
The Cognitive Services Contributor role on the Foundry resource is required to deploy the model. Quotas depend on the subscription tier : 50,000 tokens per minute and 50 requests per minute on the Medium tier, 5,000,000 tokens per minute and 5,000 requests per minute on the High tier.
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Pricing
The rate in Foundry is aligned with the direct API, in Global Standard deployment :
- Input : 2$ / 1M tokens
- Output : 6$ / 1M tokens
- Cache : 0.50$ / 1M tokens
At this price level, Grok 4.6 sits well below competing frontier models, which remains its main argument on token-heavy agentic workloads.
Why deploy it in Foundry ?
Access to the model is no longer the difficulty, operationalizing it is. Foundry brings a single platform to discover, evaluate, and deploy models, while applying the governance, security, and operational controls expected in the enterprise. Concretely, teams can evaluate Grok 4.6 against other frontier models on their own workloads, run workload-specific evaluations before deployment, expose it through managed endpoints, then integrate it into agentic applications without changing toolchain.
Conclusion
Grok 4.6 in Foundry is an additional option for teams building long-running agents, engineering copilots, or business automation, with an aggressive capability versus price ratio. The public preview status and the absence of an SLA that comes with it do require keeping it to evaluation phases, not yet to production workloads.
Sources
Microsoft Learn - Deploy and use Grok models
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