OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80%, landing at $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, a combined $1.40. GPT-5.6 Terra dropped 20% to $2 input and $12 output, totaling $14. The moves came within days of Anthropic holding Claude Opus 5 at Opus 4.8 pricing and Google releasing Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, both built around lower inference costs.
Luna at $1.40 combined still sits above DeepSeek-V4-Pro at $1.305 and well above Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 Flash at $0.40, but it closes the gap with the cheapest credible Western frontier options. OpenAI also added Sol Fast mode at $10 input and $60 output, double the Standard rate, claiming up to 2.5x throughput with no change to underlying intelligence. That is the direct play for Anthropic customers who currently pay $30 combined for Claude Opus 5.
The full pricing table in the original article is worth examining closely. It maps 27 models across Xiaomi, DeepSeek, Google, xAI, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, showing exactly where each provider sits on the cost curve right now. The competitive spread is wider than most coverage suggests, and the table makes clear that the real pressure on OpenAI is coming from Chinese labs, not just Google and Anthropic.
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