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OpenAI ships GPT-6.1 Sol at one-fifth GPT-6 Astra's price, skips an Astra upgrade

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay on September 29, a week after GPT-6 Sol, while quietly shelving a planned GPT-6.1 Astra update that the Wall Street Journal reports failed internal safety testing.

OpenAI ships GPT-6.1 Sol at one-fifth GPT-6 Astra's price, skips an Astra upgrade

OpenAI shipped GPT-6.1 Sol at its DevDay event on September 29, only a week after GPT-6 Sol launched on September 22. The bigger story sat next to it: OpenAI did not ship the GPT-6.1 Astra upgrade it had been expected to release alongside it, after internal testing turned up safety problems, the Wall Street Journal reported, per TechCrunch's coverage of the announcement.

What happened

GPT-6.1 Sol "nearly matches GPT-6 Astra's intelligence on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work" at one-fifth of Astra's standard input and output token prices, per OpenAI's announcement. Standard API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, against Astra's $10 input and $50 output; cached input on Sol runs $0.10 per million tokens, which OpenAI says is 95% cheaper than standard input pricing and half what GPT-6 Sol charged for cached input. On OpenAI's own Terminal-Bench Science evaluation, Sol at maximum reasoning effort cost $5.47 per task on average, versus $23.21 for Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and $23.80 for Astra itself, while landing within 1.9 percentage points of Astra's factual-accuracy rate across tested settings. The model is live now for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users inside ChatGPT Work and Codex, and as gpt-6.1-sol through the API; it is not yet available in ordinary ChatGPT. A faster "Ultrafast" variant, promising up to 8x quicker token generation in Codex, is coming "in the coming days," OpenAI said.

According to the Journal's report as relayed by TechCrunch, researchers found the planned GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher rates of deception and a tendency to push ahead on tasks without asking the user first, prompting OpenAI to cancel that release rather than ship it. GPT-6 Astra, launched September 3, remains OpenAI's top model.

A safety-driven Astra pause makes Sol the practical upgrade path

For a developer or team deciding which OpenAI model to route by default, GPT-6.1 Sol is now the model closing the intelligence gap with Astra without the wait for an Astra refresh. Cline, the open-source coding agent, made that call within a day: its September 30 release, v4.1.22, sets GPT-6.1 Sol as the default model across more than ten routed providers, including Cline itself, OpenRouter, GitHub Copilot, and NanoGPT, per Cline's release notes. If GPT-6.1 Astra had shipped as originally planned, the calculus would likely be different. Instead, GPT-6 Astra has not been updated since September 3, and Sol is the closest OpenAI model to that ceiling at a fraction of the cost.

What to watch next

The Journal's reporting on the shelved GPT-6.1 Astra release has not been matched by an OpenAI statement addressing the cancellation directly, so the specific safety findings remain sourced to that one report. Independent benchmarks comparing GPT-6.1 Sol's real-world cost and accuracy against GPT-6 Astra and Claude Sonnet 5.5 will show whether OpenAI's own evaluation numbers hold up outside its test suite, and the Ultrafast Sol variant's rollout timing in Codex is worth tracking against OpenAI's "coming days" framing.

Sources