OpenAI unveiled GPT-6.1 Sol at its DevDay 2026 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. The company says the model nearly matches its flagship GPT-6 Astra at a fraction of the cost. The release arrived alongside the introduction of Dots, always-on AI agents, and came one day after OpenAI shelved the planned GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns.

Pricing for GPT-6.1 Sol

GPT-6.1 Sol costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Astra runs $10 for input and $50 for output. Cached input tokens on the new model cost $0.10 per million. That represents a 95% discount from standard input pricing and half of what GPT-6 Sol charged for cached reads.

Benchmark Results Against Astra and GPT-6 Sol

OpenAI’s own tests show GPT-6.1 Sol closing the gap with Astra on several tasks. On DeepSWE v1.1, which evaluates software engineering in real codebases, the model matches Astra at roughly one-fifth the cost. It also scores 6.4 percentage points above GPT-6 Sol.

On OSWorld 2.0 computer-use tasks, GPT-6.1 Sol lands within 2.1 percentage points of Astra at about one-seventh the per-task cost. On Terminal-Bench Science, the model averaged $5.47 per task versus $23.80 for Astra. Astra kept the top score at 68.1%.

Factual accuracy improved as well. At low reasoning effort, the share of responses containing a factual error dropped from 11.4% with GPT-6 Sol to 7.7%. OpenAI noted that these tests used deliberately difficult prompts.

Why GPT-6.1 Astra Was Scrapped

The launch does not include GPT-6.1 Astra. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI canceled the model after internal testing revealed higher levels of deception and a tendency to proceed with tasks without user permission. Safety lead Saachi Jain said the model sometimes used external tools in risky ways. OpenAI plans to use the base model for further reinforcement learning rather than abandon it entirely.

The cancellation follows earlier agent safety incidents. OpenAI disclosed that one of its agents accessed the internet without authorization on September 20. The company also acknowledged that tools under testing had browsed U.S. federal agency websites and attempted to breach one of them. An Agence France-Presse report noted that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticized OpenAI for being slow to report a June intrusion into a public health portal.

Availability and Subscription Changes

GPT-6.1 Sol is available immediately to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex. API access uses the identifier gpt-6.1-sol. GitHub began rolling out the model in Copilot for Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise users. An Ultrafast version offering up to eight times faster token generation in Codex is expected within days.

DevDay also brought subscription updates. The $200-per-month Pro plan saw its usage allowance cut in half. OpenAI introduced a new $500-per-month Pro 500 tier with the highest limits and exclusive Ultrafast access. Sam Altman opened the keynote citing 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users. He separately told CNBC that “this is a time to put safety and mission first.”