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

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 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.