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.
More from Models
- Leaked Anthropic remarks: Opus 5.5 cost over $10B, AI market is "winner take all" — A_K_Nain · 2026-11-11
- ChatGPT users hit mass "could not load conversation" errors across devices while status page stays green — CleanSignalLab · 2026-11-11
- Anthropic engineer's Fable 5.2 one-shot 'AAA-level' game sparks AI-renaissance debate — RileyRalmuto · 2026-11-11
- Age-verified paying user calls out ChatGPT for still blocking consensual adult fiction — Scary_Fix_1295 · 2026-11-11
- User reports hitting usage limits after just ~15 messages on flash-lite — Weird-names · 2026-11-11
- Developer fights Claude's "clever" phrasing; standing instructions keep drifting — jkubicki · 2026-11-11