OpenAI goes full China pricing mode with an 80 percent cut to its most affordable GPT-5. 6 model
Starting July 30, OpenAI is cutting GPT-5. 6 Luna prices by 80 percent and Terra by 20 percent. OpenAI says its top-tier Sol model helped make the company's own infrastructure more efficient, enabling the cuts. Price pressure from cheap Chinese providers and Microsoft's own MAI models likely played a role too.
Jul 30, 2026OpenAI 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: OpenAIOpenAI says the cuts are possiblebecause 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 throughspeculative decoding. Growing price pressure across the AI market likely played a role too,especially from low-cost Chinese providers. Microsoft is now openly promotingits own MAI models as cheaper alternatives to OpenAI. The price war could hurt the broader market if it slows revenue growth at frontier labswhose balance sheets are tied to massive infrastructure investments. AI News Without the Hype – Curated by HumansSubscribe 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