OpenAI announced Friday it is cutting developer pricing for its most capable model, GPT-5.6 Sol, by more than 20% for the next three months. The promotional rates drop standard input pricing from $5 to $4 per million tokens and output from $30 to $20 per million tokens, effective immediately across the API, ChatGPT Work credits, and Codex.
The move marks OpenAI's third major price reduction this summer. In late July, the company slashed GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and Terra by 20%. Earlier in August, it cut prices on smaller models as enterprise customers scrutinize AI spending. Consumer-facing Pro, Plus, and Business subscription prices remain unchanged.
The pricing pressure reflects intensifying competition. Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 — its current frontier model — lists at $10/$50 per million tokens, while Claude Opus 5 sits at $5/$25. Chinese labs including DeepSeek and Moonshot have further eroded pricing power with capable models at a fraction of the cost.
For developers, the temporary Sol discount narrows the gap with Anthropic's mid-tier offerings while keeping Sol well above Luna's rock-bottom rates. Whether the cuts become permanent will depend on whether OpenAI can sustain the margin compression as training and inference costs continue to evolve.
