OpenAI cuts prices for two of its AI models as cost worries mount

OpenAI on Thursday announced it is slashing the price of two of its latest artificial intelligence models, GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.6 Luna, roughly three weeks after their public release. 

The company is facing pressure to cater to a more cost-sensitive customer base, where enterprises have been less inclined to deploy expensive models without a clear picture of the return on their investments. It’s also working to fend off competition from Chinese startups and tech giants Google and Microsoft, which have been touting cost-effective models.

OpenAI launched three models as part of its GPT-5.6 series, including Sol, the most powerful offering, Terra, the mid-tier model, and Luna, its fastest offering. 

The company said Thursday that it’s reducing the price of Terra by 20% to $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. It’s cutting the cost of Luna by 80% to 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. Sol’s pricing remains the same. 

“Our strategy remains focused on advancing both capability and efficiency so each generation of intelligence can accomplish more work at a lower cost,” OpenAI said in a release.

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, prompting companies across the U.S. to rush to deploy the technology and incentivize adoption within their workforces. The era of so-called tokenmaxxing was born, where employers encouraged staffers to use as much AI as possible without worrying about costs.

But as AI bills have ballooned, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars, many companies have been actively working to rein in their spending. It’s a shift that AI developers have been watching closely, especially as Chinese open-weight models have rapidly caught up with leading, proprietary offerings.

Open-weight AI models are available for users to download, modify and run on their own infrastructure, and can serve as a cost-effective option for companies. Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, released an open-weight model called Kimi K3 earlier this month that outperforms cutting-edge American offerings across some industry benchmarks, prompting a swift reaction from Silicon Valley.

Following Moonshot’s announcement, OpenAI’s chief rival, Anthropic, released a new model called Claude Opus 5, which it touted as its best-performing and most cost-effective offering for many use cases. It’s half the price of Claude Fable 5, the advanced model that Anthropic announced in June, even though it performs comparably across coding and knowledge work tasks.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella repeatedly highlighted his company’s cost-effective models during its quarterly earnings call with investors on Wednesday, following the launch of what it described as a cheap-but-performant cybersecurity model earlier this week.

Google also debuted three new models this month that aimed to undercut competitors on cost. The company said Gemini 3.6 Flash, the strongest of its new offerings, is cheaper per task than Kimi K3 and other Chinese models.

WATCH: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles this week