OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80% in late July. Anthropic made its Sonnet 5 launch discount permanent in August. OpenAI then cut GPT-5.6 Sol prices by 20% for three months. Anthropic released Fable 5.1 in September with a 75% cache read cost reduction. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra at similar pricing to Fable 5.1. OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half the prior input and output prices. Anthropic announced Opus 5.5 with a 40-60% total cost reduction. OpenAI followed with GPT-6.1 Sol, halving cache read costs again. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI released open-weight models at competitive prices. OpenRouter now lists 29 providers for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017. OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to be preparing for IPOs. Both companies continue to invest heavily in R&D to maintain quality advantages.
What changed
OpenAI and Anthropic maintained higher LLM pricing through June 2026.
What it unlocks
Running agentic workflows at a fraction of the prior cost.
- GPT-5.6 Luna price cut by 80% to $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 per MTok
- Claude Opus 5.5 total cost cut by 40-60%
- GPT-6.1 Sol cache read cost halved to $0.10 per MTok
- 29 providers host DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Sources