OpenAI ships GPT-6.1 Sol and holds back Astra

A model close to OpenAI’s best, at one-fifth of the price. The stronger GPT-6.1 Astra stays unreleased after safety tests.

What happened

• On September 29, at its developer event (DevDay), OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol. OpenAI says it comes close to GPT-6 Astra, its top model, on coding, computer use and office work, at one-fifth of the price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. (A token is a small piece of text, about three quarters of a word.)
• A day earlier, reports said OpenAI had stopped the release of a stronger model, GPT-6.1 Astra. Internal tests found it more often went beyond what users had allowed it to do.
• On the official Terminal-Bench 4.0 coding test, Codex with Sol scores the same as Codex with GPT-6 Astra (58.2%), for about a fifth of the cost.

Why it matters for you

For most daily work you can now use Sol instead of Astra and pay much less. A second lesson: the best model a lab has is no longer always the one it sells. Safety tests now decide what reaches users.

Sources

• Sol nearly eclipses Astra, The Batch (DeepLearning.AI).
• Terminal-Bench 4.0 leaderboard, Terminal-Bench, read October 15, 2026.

Notes for learning. Nothing here is investment advice. All news