Grok 4.3 Lands In The Picker

May 05, 2026

xAI's newest reasoning model — Grok 4.3 — is now selectable from the model picker. It has a 1M-token context window, always-on reasoning, image input, and full tool support. It bills in the workhorse band (3× token cost) — same band as Sonnet 4.6 and Kimi K2.6 — so it stays accessible on Pro and Pro Max.

What's new

• Grok 4.3 appears in the model selector under xAI's lineup.
• 1M-token context window — fits a long codebase, a sprawling research corpus, or hours of meeting notes in a single pass.
• Reasoning is always on. No mode toggle — Grok 4.3 thinks through every request.
• Image input. Pass screenshots, photos, charts, or diagrams alongside your prompt.
• Tool calling is supported — agentic workflows, multi-step research, structured-output jobs all work.
• Workhorse pricing band (3× token cost) — same band as Sonnet 4.6 and Kimi K2.6, about a fifth of the cost of frontier-tier models like Opus 4.7.

When you'd reach for it

• You've got a long-document analysis job and want a frontier-tier reasoner without a frontier-tier bill. Grok 4.3 reads the whole thing in one pass and reasons through it.
• A research workflow with screenshots in the loop — paste the chart or PDF page in alongside the prompt, get a structured read back.
• A multi-step agentic task where the model needs to keep its train of thought across many tool calls.

Try it

• "Read this 600-page contract and pull out every change request, with the page number."
• "Here's a screenshot of our funnel chart and our raw analytics export. Tell me what's actually moving the conversion rate."
• "Plan and run a deep refactor of this module — keep your reasoning visible across each step."

Heads up

• Manual pick for now. Grok 4.3 isn't part of the Auto routing pool or Swarm yet. We're holding it out until OpenRouter's response latency on the model is consistent enough not to drag down a multi-agent run. You can still pick it explicitly from the model selector any time.
• It's tagged "new" until May 18 — that pill in the picker is just a freshness flag, nothing functional.