OpenAI just took a machete to its pricing. On July 30, the company announced an 80% reduction on its GPT-5.6 Luna model, bringing costs down to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. The larger GPT-5.6 Terra got a 20% haircut, landing at $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens.
The efficiency engine behind the cuts
OpenAI attributed the reductions to internal optimizations powered by GPT-5.6 Soul, a sibling model in the same family. Those optimizations, including kernel rewrites and speculative decoding, reportedly delivered 20-35% efficiency gains in inference workloads.
The timing is not coincidental. Back in June 2026, reports surfaced that OpenAI was exploring drastic token price reductions as a defensive measure against mounting competitive pressure, particularly from Anthropic and a wave of Chinese AI labs that have been aggressively undercutting Western providers on cost.
Open-weight models are no longer the budget option
