OpenAI has overhauled the pricing of its AI lineup, significantly lowering the cost of its entry-level and mid-range models as competition in the generative AI market intensifies and businesses demand more affordable options.
The move reflects a broader shift across the AI industry, where companies are increasingly focused on reducing operating costs for customers. As organizations expand their use of AI tools, pricing has become a deciding factor, especially with lower-cost models from Chinese developers gaining traction.
The latest changes also strengthen OpenAI’s position against rivals such as Anthropic, whose Claude models remain widely used by enterprises and software developers but carry higher usage costs. Chinese open-source competitors, including Z.ai, have further raised the stakes by offering capable AI systems at substantially lower prices.
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Market observers say the pricing strategy could attract more developers and businesses to OpenAI’s platform. At the same time, they note that reducing prices may put pressure on the financial performance of AI companies that continue to spend billions of dollars on computing infrastructure while preparing for potential stock market listings.
As part of the update, OpenAI reduced the cost of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent and lowered pricing for its Terra model by 20 percent. The company did not make any changes to the pricing of Sol, its most advanced model.
According to OpenAI, improvements in GPT-5.6 allow Luna and Terra to handle workloads that previously required a premium model. That means customers can complete many AI tasks using less expensive systems without a significant drop in capability.
The company charges customers based on tokens, the units used to measure the amount of text processed by an AI model.
Under the revised rates, Luna now costs 20 cents per million input tokens, down from $1, while output tokens are priced at $1.20 instead of $6. Terra’s input token price has fallen from $2.50 to $2 per million tokens, while output token pricing has been reduced from $15 to $12.
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For comparison, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, making it costlier than Terra under OpenAI’s updated pricing.
OpenAI said the reductions were made possible by efficiency gains achieved during the development of GPT-5.6. The company said the model has improved internal coding processes and system optimization, helping lower the cost of operating its AI services.
Even as the price of individual tokens has declined across the industry, overall AI spending has become harder for businesses to predict. Many providers have shifted from fixed subscription plans to usage-based billing, leaving customers to pay according to the amount of computing required for each task. That change has made AI expenses more variable, even as per-token prices continue to fall.