pricing

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on October 26 at $1 and $5 per million tokens and says it matches GPT-6 Astra on an agent benchmark at a tenth of the per-token price, but every efficiency number is OpenAI's own and an early independent index ranks it 11th of 30.

Seven weeks of open-weight releases put models within a benchmark generation of the frontier on a $5,499 Mac Studio or a 12 GB gaming GPU, but the measured numbers show batched cloud hosts, not desktops, now set the price of mid-market tokens.

TypeSafe's Jev made fast, calibrated decision models the first new model category since reasoning models, but within four weeks its request format ran on Ollama, Cloudflare, Microsoft and 182 open-weight systems, while Jev earned 0.27% of Vercel's gateway spend.

Between August 11 and September 29, Grok Bot, Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots shipped the same standing-delegation product, and each moved routine approval from the person to a reviewer model while its terms and the courts left every consequence with the person.

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.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20 per million tokens and OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol at $2 and $10 about 90 minutes apart on September 22, and because each launch table benchmarks the other lab's previous model, the price sheets are the only like-for-like comparison.

TypeSafe's Jev answers typed questions with probabilities instead of generated text, which lets it charge $0.042 per million input tokens with free output, but its headline speed and cost multiples come from four workflows the company built itself.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3 at $10 and $50 per million tokens, 2.5 times GPT-5.6 Sol's promotional rate, as the first model it rates Critical in cybersecurity, and several of its biggest launch numbers describe configurations buyers do not get.

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 to everyone and the same weights as Mythos 5.1 to vetted US organizations, cutting cache reads 75% to $0.25, but the first independent run found a max-effort task costs 20% more than on Fable 5.

DeepSeek's peak/off-peak billing takes effect today, with V4-Pro output up 4.5x at peak and cache-hit input up as much as 12x a fortnight after OpenAI cut Luna 80%, evidence that the price war is convergence toward the true marginal cost of intelligence, not a race to zero.

Grok 4.6, Gemini 3.7 Flash, DeepSeek V4-Pro-0813, and GLM-5.3 shipped within three days of each other and not one is a new base model; the frontier is advancing by post-training, harness, and serving efficiency while every next-generation base stays in the oven.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% three weeks after launch, saying Sol rewriting its own production kernels funded the cut, which makes the real story less a blink at China than a model becoming a line item on both sides of its own P&L.

In twelve days, Chinese labs pushed the capability floor toward zero, Anthropic halved the price of the frontier and Google cut Flash tokens again, a fortnight that says the capability premium is over and margin is the only battleground left.

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 as near-frontier intelligence at half the cost of Fable 5, and read from the P&L, the launch is a margin admission that the race has moved from raw capability to cost-per-task.

Google's July 21 drop cut Flash token prices 17% and added a security-tuned Cyber variant, but the tell is the model that didn't ship: Gemini 3.5 Pro, promised for June, is still partner-only while compute moves to Gemini 4.

In 72 hours in early July, SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.5, Meta shipped Muse Image and Muse Spark 1.1 and OpenAI shipped GPT-Live while GPT-5.6 Sol waited on a government review, and the real frontier, agentic coding at $2 a million tokens, routed straight around that gate.

Google shipped Nano Banana 2 Lite at $0.034 per image and Gemini Omni Flash at $0.10 per second of video on the same day, setting a public floor price for high-volume generative media low enough to change who can afford to run it.