What happened
GitHub Copilot’s model picker, the dropdown where you choose which AI model handles your request, just gained another option. Grok 4.6, xAI’s newest model, is rolling out now across Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, the Copilot CLI, the Copilot cloud agent, the Copilot app, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, and Eclipse. GitHub described a gradual rollout without giving an exact delay.
It’s available on Copilot Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise plans. If your organization is on Business or Enterprise, there’s an extra step: an administrator has to turn on the Grok 4.6 policy in Copilot settings first. It’s off by default, so nobody on your team sees it in the picker until an admin flips that switch.
GitHub says its own testing found Grok 4.6 performed well on “longer-horizon tasks requiring sustained reasoning and tool use,” the kind of multi-step work where an agent has to hold context across many actions instead of answering one prompt at a time. xAI describes the model as built for that same category of work: navigating a codebase across many steps, not just completing one function.
Why it matters
Copilot now bills usage by the token, the small chunk of text a model reads or writes, instead of counting a flat number per request. GitHub says Grok 4.6 specifically “is billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing.” Under usage-based billing, model interactions consume AI credits according to token use. One credit equals one cent. Check your plan’s included allowance and additional-usage settings.
GitHub’s current table lists Grok 4.6 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens for inputs up to 200,000 tokens. Above that threshold, rates are $4 and $12 respectively. Cached input has a separate rate.
Long-running tasks can consume many tokens across repeated model calls. Compare total credits used for the completed task, rather than only the unit price.
If you’re used to a plan’s included usage feeling essentially unlimited for casual work, a long-running agentic session with a new model is exactly the kind of use that can burn through a monthly credit balance faster than you’d expect.
Who should care
This matters if you’re a Copilot subscriber who runs agentic, multi-step tasks, letting the agent work through a larger change on its own rather than accepting single suggestions. That’s the workload Grok 4.6 is aimed at, and it’s also the workload most likely to consume a lot of tokens in one sitting.
Code completions and next-edit suggestions are not billed in AI credits. Chat questions are billed by tokens, including the context sent with them.
If you administer a Business or Enterprise Copilot account, the decision is upstream of your team: whether to turn the policy on at all, since it stays off until you do.
What builders should do next
Before you switch your default model to Grok 4.6, open GitHub’s models and pricing documentation and find its per-token rate next to whatever model you use today. Combine the applicable rate with actual token use to estimate cost.
Then compare a task with a verifiable result. Pick a real multi-step task you’d normally hand to your current model, something like fixing a bug that touches three or four files, and run it once with your usual model and once with Grok 4.6. Compare four things: whether the fix was actually correct, how many follow-up corrections you had to make, how long each run took, and how many AI credits each one consumed. A model that’s cheaper per token isn’t automatically cheaper for the task if it needs more steps, or more corrections, to get there.
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