penAI is usually the AI industry's trendsetter. Its latest focus is all about making tokens more affordable.
Last week, the company announced that it would cut prices of GPT-5.6 Sol, its highest performing model, by more than 20% for developers for the next three months. The model is now priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens for standard short-context use, compared to previous pricing of $5 per 1 million input tokens and $30 per 1 million output tokens.
It's also far below the costs of Fable 5, the most powerful model from rival Anthropic, which runs at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Sol is now also cheaper than Opus 5, Anthropic's most recent model, which comes out to $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
It's not the first time OpenAI has slashed prices for its models. Last month, the company chopped prices for GPT-5.6 Terra, its mid-tier model, and GPT-5.6 Luna, its lightweight, efficient model, by 20% and 80%, respectively.
Though these price cuts help it stay competitive with Anthropic, they also may be edging the company beyond cheaper Chinese alternatives: In a post on X, Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at VC firm Theory, noted that OpenAI's Luna is price competitive with DeepSeek's latest model intelligence-to-dollar.
Additionally, according to benchmark platform Arena, Sol's price decrease has improved its performance in agentic benchmarks for coding and work.
These price cuts come as enterprises begin to seriously question their AI spending, with agents poised to increase inference costs up to fivefold, according to recent Gartner research. And the evidence is already starting to pile up that companies are shifting away from implementing frontier AI at any cost:
- In mid-August, data from payments platform Rampindicated that most of business spending on Anthropic modelswasn'ton its ultrapowerful model Fable 5, comprising only 6% of token spend. - For comparison, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol comprised 25% of tokens used by OpenAI Ramp customers.
- Meanwhile, Anthropic's less powerful Opus 5has surpassed Fable 5 in business spending.
Our Deeper View #
Though OpenAI tends to be one of the industry's tastemakers, it may also be reading the tea leaves from the fact that enterprises are pulling back spending on powerful frontier models, and are largely comfortable settling for efficiency over capability for many tasks. It's why small models, domain-specific models, and open-source alternatives are gaining so much traction. However, as getting enterprises to adopt frontier intelligence is a major part of the company's strategy, these discounts might be a way to get people to see beyond the price tag. Even if these companies don't *need *Thor's hammer to kill a fly, by selling Thor's hammer on the cheap, it seems that OpenAI wants them to give it a shot anyway. Plus, with OpenAI putting its best models on sale, perhaps Anthropic will follow in its footsteps.