OpenAI and Anthropic each released cheaper AI models on Tuesday, their first launches since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the whole industry to slow down advanced AI development, a plea Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman later joined. OpenAI added GPT-6 Sol, a tier below its flagship Astra built for coding and other complex work, and GPT-6 Luna for high-volume jobs like summarizing documents, with API prices half of GPT-5.6’s promotional rates. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 spends fewer tokens getting to its answers, which the company says makes it about 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5. Both labs are chasing customers who want to cut their AI bills, as open-weight models from Chinese companies like Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek undercut them on price.
