OPENAI CRASHES ANTHROPIC'S IPO DAY WITH A HALF-PRICE MODEL

OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra on Monday, hours after Anthropic's IPO filing landed — a mid-tier model built for the screen work of an office day: reading what's on screen, clicking through apps, filling out forms, and writing up the results. It is available immediately in ChatGPT Work, Codex, and through the API as gpt-6.1-terra.

The pitch is price and speed, not raw power: standard API rates are 50% lower than its predecessor GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol, at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. OpenAI says Terra matches its flagship GPT-6 Astra on Agents' Last Exam at one-tenth the price per token and finishes tasks over three times faster.

The announcement takes a direct shot at the day's other protagonist: at maximum effort Terra is over three times as token-efficient as Claude Opus 5.5 at one-fourth the price per token — roughly nine times cheaper per task. OpenAI also notes the model meets the Critical threshold for cybersecurity under its Preparedness Framework.