OpenAI rolls out budget-priced mid-tier GPT-6.1 Terra

OpenAI has added a mid-range model to its GPT-6.1 family, offering strong performance at a lower price. The AI business' general-purpose models span four tiers. Products named "Sol" or "Astra" are its high-end offerings and come with price tags to match. "Luna" models are its cheapest offerings. This new model gets the "Terra" treatment the company reserves for mid-range models. "Terra continues to advance the cost-intelligence frontier across our model families, providing a new balance of speed, capability, and cost," OpenAI said . "Its standard API prices are 50 percent lower than those of GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol, making it practical for developers to automate high-volume work, like reading incoming invoices and entering their details into accounting software." Artificial Analysis, a site that tracks model performance and cost, notes that GPT-6.1 Terra pushes the cost efficiency frontier. "It is the first Terra-class model since GPT-5.6, and is more intelligent for less than a third of the cost," the site says. GPT-6 Luna ($0.10/M input tokens, $0.50/M output) occupies the lowest tier of OpenAI's model lineup in terms of cost and capability, followed by GPT-6.1 Terra ($1/M, $5/M), GPT-6.1 Sol ($2/M, $10/M), and GPT-6 Astra ($10/M, $50/M). In a comment posted to Hacker News, Ted Sanders, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, framed the differences between the various GPT-6.1 models thus: "In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, I'd say Terra is probably better than Astra and Sol at technical communication, similar on vision and computer use (but much faster!), and a bit worse on most other things. For API developers, it's a nice midrange option if you want something cheaper than Sol but a lot smarter than Luna (especially for vision/computer use/communication)." "For subscribers, it's not a bombshell release – if you're hitting usage limits, maybe it helps you go a bit further, and if you want clearer communication or faster computer use, it can be a nice option to select." Terra's knowledge cutoff date, June 1, 2026, means it is the most up-to-date of its model family. Perhaps that counts for something if you're asking questions about events after April 30, 2026 – the training data cutoff for Astra and Sol. In terms of model safety, Terra handles harmful requests a bit less frequently than GPT-6.1 Sol but also avoids unnecessary refusals more often than its more capable sibling. But as noted by Max Woolf, a data scientist, in a recent blog post , the real …