OpenAI goes full China pricing mode with an 80 percent cut to its most affordable GPT-5.6 model

OpenAI goes full China pricing mode with an 80 percent cut to its most affordable GPT-5.6 model Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Jul 30, 2026 OpenAI is cutting GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80 percent and Terra by 20 percent, effective July 30. Luna drops to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Terra falls to $2 and $12. Sol pricing stays the same. OpenAI says Luna matches the performance of leading models from a year ago, but a task that cost a dollar with those models now runs about 6 cents on Luna, nearly nine times faster. All models are available through ChatGPT Work, Codex, and the OpenAI API. OpenAI's smallest AI model, Luna, aims to dominate competitors on price-to-performance. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI says the cuts are possible because GPT-5.6 Sol made the company's own infrastructure more efficient. The model allegedly optimized GPU software on its own, cutting deployment costs by 20 percent. It also improved token generation by more than 15 percent through speculative decoding. Growing price pressure across the AI market likely played a role too, especially from low-cost Chinese providers. Microsoft is now openly promoting its own MAI models as cheaper alternatives to OpenAI. The price war could hurt the broader market if it slows revenue growth at frontier labs whose balance sheets are tied to massive infrastructure investments.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1Ad AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now Source: OpenAI Ask about this article… Search