❯ OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Sol, offering near-Astra capability at one-fifth of the price

Five times cheaper, one point behindOpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol, saying it nearly matches flagship GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Independent evaluator Artificial Analysis found it scores just 1 point below Astra on its Intelligence Index at less than a quarter of the cost per task.

The predecessor lasted seven daysIn OpenAI’s lineup, Astra is the strongest and most expensive tier, while Sol is the workhorse for everyday, high-volume work. GPT-6 Sol was replaced after just 7 days. OpenAI says the new version is clearly better at writing and debugging code, understanding documents and running multi-step business workflows, and moves closer to Astra in alignment evaluations, being more open about its limits and more respectful of user intent. It is available from today to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API.

Head-on with Sonnet 5.5The $2/$10 pricing exactly matches Claude Sonnet 5.5, which Anthropic rolled out this week, putting the two companies in a direct value fight over mid-tier workhorse models. Much of the coding and automation work at enterprise dev teams used to force a trade-off between “expensive and strong” and “cheap but not enough”; now near-flagship capability runs at mid-tier prices, changing both model bills and how teams choose. One enterprise vendor said on X that customers already ask which model to budget for next year, while the models themselves change almost weekly.

▪ SIGNALWhen the gap between flagship and mid-tier shrinks to a single point, the price sheet rather than the leaderboard starts deciding how much work companies hand to AI.