Deep|LLM: Tiered Model Pricing Is Broadening AI Adoption; Limited Impact by Jev

On September 22, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, 20% below Opus 5. Anthropic estimates that a typical customer workload costs 40% less to run. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol ($2/$10) and GPT-6 Luna ($0.10/$0.50) the same day, at prices 50–58% below the prevailing rates for the corresponding GPT-5.6 models and 60–92% below their July 9 launch prices. GPT-6 Luna is the first U.S. model since DeepSeek launched its V4 series to undercut DeepSeek’s cheapest model on both input and output list prices: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.15/$0.60 even at off-peak rates. In the text, paired prices such as $4/$20 denote input/output charges per million tokens.

We remain positive on the outlook for AI adoption. Frontier models still carry premium prices, while cheaper models make more everyday tasks economical to automate. Offering models at different price and capability tiers lets developers match the model to the task and their budget. Applications that were previously too expensive to run can now be deployed. As more applications enter production and existing users do more with them, we expect both AI usage and compute demand to keep growing.

API list prices for the models discussed (US$ per million tokens)