Anthropic and OpenAI ship cheaper models 101 minutes apart; GPT-6 Sol beats Astra on price
altryne · x · 2026-09-27
One week after lab heads pledged to 'pace the frontier', Anthropic and OpenAI released cheaper models just 101 minutes apart. Author altryne's take after real-world testing: GPT-6 Sol is his better daily driver over flagship Astra — half the price, 90% off cached input, and Astra burns tokens for mediocre results; Peter Gostev agrees.
Pricing per 1M tokens:
- Claude Opus 5.5: $4 in / $0.20 cached read / $20 out — roughly 40% cheaper than Opus 5, with cached reads cut to 20¢
- GPT-6 Sol: half of GPT-5.6's price; Luna is 40x cheaper again
- Advice: run your own workload math — for agentic coding, cache reads dominate the bill, which may favor Opus 5.5
The episode also covers Meta putting Muse front and center, Grok moving into Tesla, and an open-source Jev clone built in a week.
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