Anthropic and OpenAI Ship Cheaper Models 101 Minutes Apart, Igniting a Price War
altryne · x · 2026-09-25
One week after every lab head signed the "pace the frontier" pledge, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped big new models 101 minutes apart — and both are CHEAPER:
- Claude Opus 5.5 (Sep 22, 09:31 PT): Fable-level intelligence at 40% less than Opus 5 — input $4, cached reads cut to $0.20, output $20 (previously $5/$0.50/$25). Users report it "talks like a human again" and quotas last longer.
- GPT-6 Sol and Luna (same day, 11:12 PT): Sol priced at half of GPT-5.6; per token, Sol is half the price of Opus 5.5, and Luna is 40x cheaper again.
But raw token pricing misleads: for agentic coding, cached reads dominate the bill, so Opus 5.5's 20¢ cache pricing may win — run your own workload. Also this week: Meta puts Muse at the center of everything, Grok moves into your Tesla, and open source cloned Jev in a week.
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