OpenAI cut prices on two GPT-5.6 models Thursday, roughly three weeks after the models originally launched. Terra, its mid-tier model, was made 20% cheaper (reaching $2 input / $12 output per million tokens), and Luna, its fastest and cheapest model, was cut 80% to reach $0.20 input / $1.20 output. However, pricing for Sol, the flagship model at the top of the GPT 5.6 family, remained unchanged. OpenAI attributed the cuts to efficiency gains, noting that Sol autonomously rewrote production kernels and ran experiments that reduced serving costs by 20% while improving token generation efficiency by over 15%. The company also claims that Luna now outperforms Fable 5 on professional work benchmarks at a cost per task 99% lower.
OpenAI was not alone this month among frontier labs racing to cut prices. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 at half the price of Fable 5 with comparable coding performance, and Google positioned Gemini 3.6 Flash as cheaper per task than Kimi K3. The week of Kimi K3’s release, we noted that it was the first Chinese open-weight model to benchmark ahead of Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, and argued it could upend the enterprise calculus on whether a closed frontier model justifies its premium. Three different US labs cut prices later the same month. Roughly 95% of enterprise AI usage still runs on frontier models, implying the migration to cheaper alternatives had barely started before the price cuts were announced.
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