codex

On October 21, OpenAI and Google Cloud put GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna into private preview in Model Garden, payable from existing Google Cloud commitments and headed for Google's own agent products, while OpenAI said Microsoft remains its primary cloud partner.

GPT-6.1 Sol ties GPT-6 Astra on OpenAI's own coding benchmark at $2 and $10 per million tokens, a fifth of Astra's rate, but its Ultrafast tier costs $12 and $60, which moves OpenAI's price premium from intelligence to latency.

In 48 hours the question of where long-running coding agents actually run got both answers at once: an indie $7M bet against lock-in, and a frontier-lab acquisition that pulls the runtime layer inside Codex.

The Codex CLI config that ends the permission nagging — config.toml profiles, sandbox and approval modes, AGENTS.md, reasoning effort, MCP servers, and the codex exec setup for CI.

Greg Brockman's AI Ascent 2026 thesis is that judgment, not compute, becomes the scarce resource as agents take over execution — and Codex Cloud, Cursor 3, Devin, and Anthropic auto mode are already pricing it in.