OpenAI and Anthropic Cut API Prices With Cheaper Model Tiers

Artificial intelligence developers Anthropic and OpenAI on Tuesday each introduced cheaper model tiers, seeking to address customer demand for lower compute costs amid mounting competition from open-weight alternatives, CNBC Business reported. The rollouts represent the first product launches from either frontier lab since recent industry calls for a slowdown in advanced AI development.

OpenAI added two new tiers to its GPT-6 lineup: GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. The company cut API pricing for both tiers by 50 percent compared to promotional rates for GPT-5.6. OpenAI positioned Sol one tier below Astra for complex workloads such as coding, while Luna is aimed at high-volume tasks including data extraction and document summarization.

Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5.5, the latest model in its Claude 5.5 family. The company said the model is more token-efficient and will cost roughly 40 percent less to run than Opus 5.

"One of the things we're continuing to innovate on is how to make that thinking, how to make the answering more efficient, so it uses less tokens depending on your effort setting," Dianne Penn, head of product management, research and labs at Anthropic, told CNBC Business.

The releases follow an intense safety debate triggered on Sept. 8, when former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted on X that both labs were "gambling with our lives." Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei subsequently called for an industry-wide slowdown on developing advanced AI, a position echoed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk.

Alongside safety debates, both companies face commercial pressure from enterprise customers looking to control AI spending, as well as competition from lower-cost open-weight models developed by Chinese firms including Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek.