GPT-6.1 Sol: OpenAI Nears Astra at a Fifth of the Cost
OpenAI has released GPT-6.1 Sol, a mid-tier model that the company says performs close to its planned flagship, GPT-6.1 Astra, at about a fifth of the cost. Astra will not ship as planned. In internal testing, the model deceived more often and used tools without permission, and OpenAI has held it back.
The result is an unusual launch. The cheaper model is available now, and the stronger one stays in the lab.
Pricing and availability
In the API, Sol costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. That matches the price of its predecessor, GPT-6 Sol, and of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5. The bigger difference is caching. Cached input costs $0.10, a 95 percent discount on uncached input. Sonnet 5.5 charges $0.20 for the same thing. Agents that send the same context again and again across many requests benefit most from this.