Anthropic and OpenAI ship cheaper models 101 minutes apart, igniting a price war
thursdai_pod · x · 2026-09-27
ThursdAI's Sep 24 episode covers a wild week: one week after lab heads signed Dario's "pace the frontier" pledge, Anthropic and OpenAI launched major models 101 minutes apart — both cheaper.
Key points:
- Claude Opus 5.5 (Sep 22, 9:31 PT): Fable-level, 40% cheaper than Opus 5; $4/$20 per 1M tokens, cached reads cut to 20¢
- GPT-6 Sol and Luna (Sep 22, 11:12 PT): half of GPT-5.6's price — Sol at $2/$10, Luna at $0.10/$0.50, 40x cheaper than Sol
- Cache reads dominate agentic coding bills, so Opus 5.5's 20¢ cache may actually be cheaper per-workload despite Sol's lower sticker price
- Also: Meta puts Muse at the center of everything, Grok moves into Tesla, open source cloned Jev in a week
Notable trend: both labs upgraded their everyday models, not just their flagships.
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