GPT-6 Astra Costs 2.5x More Than GPT-5.6 Sol and Scores About the Same
Book: AI That Ships The series: AI in TypeScript — 5 books, from your first LLM call to agents in production — all five here My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub A new model lands. Someone on your team opens a pull request that changes one string in one config file, the model id. The diff is green in five minutes. Evals look fine, maybe a point better on the suite you happen to have. It ships. Three weeks later the invoice arrives and it is a different shape than the one before it. Nobody wrote a bad loop. Nobody shipped a prompt-injection. The system does exactly what it did last month. It just costs more to do it, because a one-line diff moved every request from $2 and $10 per million tokens to $10 and $50. OpenAI announced GPT-6 Astra on 3 September 2026. OpenAI calls it the most capable model it has shipped. That is the company's claim and I am not going to argue with it. But "most capable model available" and "the model your service should call by default" are two different questions, and the distance between them shows up on your infrastructure bill. What the launch numbers say The API list price at launch, per OpenAI: Standard tier: $10 per 1M input tokens, $50 per 1M output tokens Fast tier: $20 per 1M input tokens, $100 per 1M output tokens Astra takes text and image input and returns text only, with a 1M token context window. It went first to a limited set of organisations under OpenAI's Daybreak Access programme, with wider access to the paid ChatGPT tiers and the API announced as planned for the days after launch. It is also listed on AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Azure. Now the third-party read. Artificial Analysis runs its own evaluations independently of the vendors. On its Intelligence Index, Astra scores 60 , which puts it #14 of the 202 models the site tracks. Its cost per Intelligence Index task comes out at $0.96 . The median model in that set scores 36 a