To quote an ancient Jedi Master “Begun, the AI price wars have!”
OpenAI is sharply reducing the prices of two models in its GPT-5.6 frontier series, cutting GPT-5.6 Luna, the smallest and fastest model in the series, by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra, the mid-tier model, by 20%, while adding a premium Fast mode for its flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model.
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The cuts place Luna much closer to the lowest-cost commercial models in the market and arrive just a few days after Anthropic released its highly performant Claude Opus 5 at the same price as Opus 4.8, and Google introduced Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, two rival models built around lower inference costs, faster execution and more efficient agent workloads.
OpenAI is successfully undercutting Google’s price per intelligence and attempting to sway Anthropic users, who may not mind paying more, with a speed boost.
OpenAI says Luna will now cost $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, for a combined input-plus-output price of $1.40 per million tokens.
Terra will cost $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens, for a combined price of $14.
Pricing for Sol Standard remains unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. OpenAI is also adding Sol Fast mode at twice the Standard price: $10 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens.
The company says Fast mode delivers up to 2.5 times the throughput without changing the model’s underlying intelligence.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman took to X to announce the changes as “major price cuts today.”
VentureBeat Frontier AI model API pricing comparison
Model
Input ($/1M)
Output ($/1M)
Total ($/1M)
Source
MiMo-V2.5 Flash
$0.10
$0.30
$0.40
Xiaomi
deepseek-v4-flash
$0.14
$0.28
$0.42
DeepSeek
deepseek-v4-pro
$0.435
$0.87
$1.305
DeepSeek
GPT-5.6 Luna
$0.20
$1.20
$1.40
OpenAI
MiniMax-M3
$0.30
$1.20
$1.50
MiniMax
LongCat-2.0 — limited-time promo
$0.30
$1.20
$1.50
LongCat
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
$0.25
$1.50
$1.75
Qwen3.7-Plus
$0.40
$1.60
$2.00
Alibaba Cloud
MiMo-V2.5
$0.40
$2.00
$2.40
Xiaomi
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
$0.30
$2.50
$2.80
LongCat-2.0 — standard
$0.75
$2.95
$3.70
LongCat
MiMo-V2.5 Pro (≤256K)
$1.00
$3.00
$4.00
Xiaomi
GLM-5.2
$1.40
$4.40
$5.80
Z.ai
Grok 4.5
$2.00
$6.00
$8.00
xAI
MiMo-V2.5 Pro (>256K)
$2.00
$6.00
$8.00
Xiaomi
Gemini 3.6 Flash
$1.50
$7.50
$9.00
Qwen3.7-Max
$2.50
$7.50
$10.00
Alibaba Cloud
Gemini 3.5 Flash
$1.50
$9.00
$10.50
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (≤200K)
$2.00
$12.00
$14.00
GPT-5.6 Terra
$2.00
$12.00
$14.00
OpenAI
GPT-5.4
$2.50
$15.00
$17.50
OpenAI
Kimi K3
$3.00
$15.00
$18.00
Moonshot AI
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (>200K)
$4.00
$18.00
$22.00
Claude Opus 5
$5.00
$25.00
$30.00
Anthropic
GPT-5.5
$5.00
$30.00
$35.00
OpenAI
GPT-5.5 Instant (chat-latest)
$5.00
$30.00
$35.00
OpenAI
Sakana Fugu Ultra (≤272K)
$5.00
$30.00
$35.00
Sakana AI
GPT-5.6 Sol — Standard mode
$5.00
$30.00
$35.00
OpenAI
Claude Fable 5 / Claude Mythos 5
$10.00
$50.00
$60.00
Anthropic
GPT-5.6 Sol — Fast mode
$10.00
$60.00
$70.00
OpenAI
Pricing is shown per one million tokens. Total cost is calculated as input price plus output price. Cached-input pricing is excluded to keep the comparison consistent across providers.
OpenAI moves Luna into the low-cost tier
The most consequential change is the Luna price cut.
When OpenAI introduced the GPT-5.6 series, Luna was priced at $1 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, for a combined total of $7. The new pricing reduces that combined figure to $1.40.
That places Luna below Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, which costs a combined $2.80 per million input and output tokens, and far below Gemini 3.6 Flash at $9. Luna also now costs less than OpenAI’s own GPT-5.4 and Terra models by a wide margin.
It is not the cheapest model in the broader market. Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5 Flash, DeepSeek’s flash model and several other APIs remain less expensive on a pure token basis. But the reduction brings an OpenAI frontier-series model into direct competition with the market’s low-cost inference tier.
OpenAI says the GPT-5.6 series represents its frontier model family, with Sol positioned at the top of the lineup, Terra as the middle tier and Luna as the smallest and fastest option.
The lineup was initially released in late June 2026 through a limited rollout by U.S. government request, before broader access, with each model intended to offer a different tradeoff among intelligence, latency and cost.
Sol is aimed at the most complex reasoning-heavy and agentic workloads, including advanced coding, multi-step planning and tool-using systems, while Terra is designed for general production use where a balance of capability and efficiency is required. Luna is positioned for high-throughput, low-latency tasks such as summarization, classification, routing, and lightweight real-time assistants where cost per request is the primary constraint.