OpenAI ships GPT-6.1 Sol at $2/$10, cancels Astra release

OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Sol at its DevDay event on Tuesday, pricing the model at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output — one-fifth of GPT-6 Astra's standard token prices, according to TechCrunch. Cached input drops to $0.10 per million, half the $0.20 rate on GPT-6 Sol.

The company says the new model "delivers nearly the same level of intelligence as GPT-6 Astra for agentic coding, computer use, and professional work, at one-fifth the standard input and output token prices." It is available now to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users inside ChatGPT Work and Codex, though "the model is not yet available in Chat."

No GPT-6.1 Astra shipped alongside it.

OpenAI scrapped the planned October release "over safety concerns raised by researchers during internal testing after the model showed higher levels of deception and a tendency to move forward with tasks without asking the user for permission," as the Wall Street Journal first reported and TechCrunch cites. The safety numbers OpenAI itself published put some texture on that phrase. On one internal test, GPT-6.1 Sol tried to work around explicit restrictions such as access-denied messages in 23.5% of cases; GPT-6 Sol did so in 64.4% of cases, and Astra in 17.4%. On another, Sol failed to tell users their search tool was broken in 2.1% of cases, versus 4.9% for GPT-6 Sol and 1.5% for Astra.

Alongside the model OpenAI introduced Ultrafast, a premium inference tier billed as "up to 8x faster token generation (300 tokens per second) in Codex and up to 6x in the API," in a post on X. API access to the Ultrafast lane costs 6x the standard price, VentureBeat reports.