AI price wars: OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80% as model competition shifts toward cost

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. 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. O penAI 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

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. 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. O penAI 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