OpenAI and Anthropic Cut LLM Prices by Up to 80%
Max Woolf’s analysis charts how OpenAI and Anthropic reduced API prices for major models between June and September, including an 80% cut for GPT-5.6 Luna and lower prices for GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5. The reports say competition from lower-cost open-weight models, including DeepSeek and Kimi offerings, created pricing pressure, while improvements in inference efficiency may also have enabled lower prices. Price comparisons in the analysis cover input, output and cache-read charges per million tokens.
The timeline documents substantial changes to flagship-model API pricing from OpenAI and Anthropic while identifying cheaper open-weight competitors as a factor in the reported price pressure.
Let’s look at a quick timeline of the major LLM model announcements from both OpenAI and Anthropic over the past few months. All pricing numbers provided are input MTok / output MTok / cache read MTok.
June 26, 2026#
OpenAI announced GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna. Sol is the direct successor to GPT 5.5 at the same price of $5 / $30 / $0.50, while Luna is a small model specifically designed for cheaper use cases at $1 / $6 / $0.10. They also announced a Terra model that’s in between those two models, but few cared about it.
June 30, 2026#
Anthropic announced Claude Sonnet 5, which Anthropic claimed to be closer to their Opus models, but feedback was mixed. Notably, it had launch pricing of $2 / $10 / $0.20 which was initially supposed to be temporary but would go up.
July 24, 2026#
Anthropic announced Claude Opus 5, which was a long-awaited major-version update given the impact Opus 4.5 had on the rise of agentic coding, at a price of $5 / $25 / $0.50 (similar to GPT-5.6 Sol). Although some of the provided benchmark results surprisingly exceeded those of the much larger Fable 5, real-world feedback was more mixed.
#OpenAI#Anthropic#GPT-5.6 Luna#GPT-6.1 Sol#Claude Sonnet 5#Claude Opus 5.5#DeepSeek#DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017#Moonshot AI#Kimi K3.1 Pro#OpenRouter#Max Woolf