$ diff grok-4-6 longcat-2-0
Grok 4.6 vs LongCat-2.0
Values come from Grok 4.6 and LongCat-2.0, where each is cited to its source. This page states no benchmark result and ranks neither model — it puts two published specifications next to each other. Where a lab has not published a figure, the row says so rather than guessing.
xAIGrok 4.6
- context
- 500K
- weights
- closed
- $/M in
- $2
- $/M out
- $6
- context
- 1M
- weights
- open
- $/M in
- $0.3
- $/M out
- $1.2
What actually differs
- Context window
- LongCat-2.0 takes 1M against 500K — 2× more room in a single request.
- Input price
- LongCat-2.0 at $0.3/M against $2/M — 6.7× cheaper to feed. Standard rates: one of these labs also quotes a lower cached-input tier, which applies only when a prefix is reused — see the full spec below.
- Output price
- LongCat-2.0 at $1.2/M against $6/M — 5.0× cheaper to generate. Output dominates the bill on most agentic workloads, where the model writes far more than it reads.
- Weights
- LongCat-2.0 publishes weights (MIT (commercially permissive)); Grok 4.6 is API-only. That decides self-hosting, air-gapped deployment and fine-tuning before any capability question does.
- Recency
- Grok 4.6 shipped 38 days after LongCat-2.0 (2026-08-07 vs 2026-06-30).
Full spec
| Attribute | Grok 4.6 | LongCat-2.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | xAI | Meituan |
| Released | 2026-08-07 | 2026-06-30 |
| Context window | 500,000 tokens | 1 million tokens (LongCat Sparse Attention / LSA) |
| Pricing | $2/M input · $6/M output; a request reaching 200K tokens re-prices in full at $4.00/M input · $1.00/M cached input · $12.00/M output | $0.30/M input · $1.20/M output ($0.006/M cached input) — OpenRouter catalogue, read 2026-07-28. Open weights, so this is hosted-inference pricing rather than a licence fee. |
| License | proprietary | MIT (commercially permissive) |
| Availability | API | Open-sourced 2026-06-30; previously served on OpenRouter under the codename "Owl Alpha" |