API pricing

US companies are spending less on AI even as usage hit a record high at the end of September, according to the latest Ramp AI Index. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian attributes the drop almost entirely to price competition between OpenAI and Anthropic. In the last week of September, Anthropic took 51% of token spending and OpenAI 44.5%.

Google has launched Gemini 4 Argon, the first model in the Gemini 4 family, at an introductory $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Artificial Analysis says it matches GPT-6 Astra on its Intelligence Index at 60% of the cost per task, with a 15% hallucination rate. Access starts with Google's Fairwind Program for governments and trusted partners.

OpenAI is reopening its $200-per-month Pro subscription to new sign-ups while cutting the API credits bundled with it in half. The company also removed the 5-hour usage cap, letting subscribers spend their weekly allotment however they choose.

Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen-Audio-3.1, a five-model lineup covering speech recognition, text-to-speech, and real-time voice interaction. Alongside the release, Alibaba cut API pricing by up to 95 percent for ASR, 85 percent for real-time models, and 70 percent for TTS.

OpenAI has released GPT-6 Sol Pro, which runs the existing GPT-6 Sol model with its reasoning mode set to 'pro' for higher-quality responses on complex tasks. It carries a 1.1 million token context window and is priced at $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens.

OpenAI has released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, two new models that cost 50% less than their GPT-5.6 equivalents while claiming improved coding and computer-use performance. The models roll out today to ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users.

OpenAI has released GPT-6 Sol and Luna, updated versions of its mid-tier and lightweight models, priced at half the cost of their GPT-5.6 predecessors. The company claims GPT-6 Sol makes roughly half as many factual errors as its predecessor, reaching what it calls 'Astra-level reliability' at lower cost.

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live and a reasoning-enhanced Extended Thinking variant for voice agents, pricing audio input at $0.005/minute versus OpenAI's $0.05/minute for GPT-Live-1. The Extended Thinking model tops the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Leaderboard with 82.6 percent.

OpenAI has launched a preview of 'Ultrafast' mode for GPT-5.6 Sol, delivering up to 750 output tokens per second through Cerebras inference hardware. The feature is initially limited to select API customers as part of a tiered speed pricing structure.

DeepSeek will raise API output token pricing roughly fourfold starting August 16, introducing peak and off-peak rates for its V4 Pro and V4 Flash models. Despite the increase, DeepSeek remains cheaper than competitors like OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Moonshot's Kimi K3.

DeepSeek released build V4-Pro-0813 with major agent benchmark gains, open-sourced its Deepseek Harness agent framework under MIT license, and announced API price increases of up to 52% effective August 16.

xAI released Grok 4.6, claiming intelligence on par with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and just one point behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 Max on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The model is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with a faster variant at double that rate.

Mistral has made regional inference generally available, letting customers route requests through EU or US servers for a 10 percent surcharge, while also launching a paid Priority Tier that charges 1.75x standard pricing for faster processing during peak traffic. Both offerings carry significant limitations on what data and features they actually cover.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80 percent to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Terra dropped 20 percent to $2/$12. The company attributes the cuts to infrastructure efficiency gains and mounting price competition, particularly from Chinese providers.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, its fourth model launch in under two months, priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The company claims the model matches or beats its flagship Fable 5 on most coding and knowledge-work benchmarks while posting the lowest deception rate of any model it has shipped.

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5, upgrading from Opus 4.8, with pricing held at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The company claims the model approaches the intelligence of its flagship Fable 5 model at half the cost.

OpenAI released GPT-5.5 on April 23, its first retrained base model since GPT-4.5, scoring 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 versus GPT-5.4's 75.1% and Claude Opus 4.7's 69.4%. API pricing is set at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, exactly double GPT-5.4 rates.