OpenAI said Thursday it is cutting prices for two GPT-5.6 models, just three weeks after the models launched — an unusually fast repricing driven by efficiency gains and intensifying competition from cheaper Chinese open-weight models.
GPT-5.6 Luna, the fastest and lowest-cost version, drops by roughly 80%, to 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. GPT-5.6 Terra, the mid-range version, becomes 20% cheaper, at $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. The most powerful model, GPT-5.6 Sol, keeps its price — though OpenAI also introduced a faster API option for it.
"OpenAI claims it can now deliver substantially more intelligence per dollar through efficiency improvements," Axios notes. Price cuts typically arrive months after a launch; doing so within three weeks underscores how quickly the company is moving to defend its position as customers grow more price-sensitive.
The repricing comes amid a heated battle with Anthropic and other labs, and as cheaper Chinese open-weight models pressure US companies to prove their frontier models justify higher costs. OpenAI and Anthropic have both adjusted pricing, rate limits and usage policies as newer reasoning models consume far more tokens during long-running agentic tasks.
