Both frontier labs cut prices the same day; intelligence keeps getting cheaper per token
Anthropic and OpenAI shipped new models and cut prices 40-50% on the same day; reprice your cost assumptions, treat performance claims as vendor-reported.
ImportanceMaterialEvidenceE3 inspectableWrite-upDeep
Anthropic and OpenAI released new model tiers about 90 minutes apart on September 22, and both cut prices sharply: frontier-level intelligence keeps falling in price per token.
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 is priced at $4 input and $20 output per million tokens, with cache reads at $0.20; the company says typical workloads cost 40% less than Opus 5, and cache reads 60% less. OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol is 50% below GPT-5.6 pricing at $2/$10, and Luna at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens.
All performance-leadership claims are vendor-reported: Anthropic itself concedes that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide at this capability level, and OpenAI's AutomationBench comparisons use its own framing. Treat the price cuts as verified facts and the rankings as claims awaiting independent checks.