OpenAI Cuts ChatGPT 5.6 Luna Token Prices 80% as China-Led AI Price War Intensifies
Updated
Updated · Tom's Hardware · Aug 3
OpenAI Cuts ChatGPT 5.6 Luna Token Prices 80% as China-Led AI Price War Intensifies
3 articles · Updated · Tom's Hardware · Aug 3
Summary
OpenAI cut ChatGPT 5.6 Luna pricing to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 for output, while trimming mid-tier 5.6 Terra by 20% to $2 and $12.
The cuts follow pressure from cheaper Chinese rivals including DeepSeek V4 and Moonshot's Kimi K3, and come just over a week after Google launched lower-cost Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite models.
Luna now sells roughly March-level flagship intelligence at about one-thirteenth of GPT-5.4's token price, showing how quickly frontier-model pricing is collapsing even as OpenAI keeps premium 5.6 Sol pricing unchanged or higher.
That squeeze raises margin questions for OpenAI, which the report says already missed revenue targets and has committed about $600 billion in compute spending by 2030.
The broader bet is that cheaper tokens will spur enough extra usage to offset thinner margins, but the report says falling prices still look hard to reconcile with the industry's huge infrastructure bills.