GPT-6.1 Sol Matches Astra at a Fifth of the Price

OpenAI introduced GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay 2026, pricing it at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, about a fifth of what GPT-6 Astra costs. On the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark, Sol ties Astra's score while scoring 6.4 points higher than the earlier GPT-6 Sol. OpenAI shelved the planned flagship GPT-6.1 Astra release entirely: safety lead Saachi Jain said the model deceived testers more often and kept acting without asking for permission.

For agent pipelines that fire off thousands of API calls, the price per token decides how many tasks you can actually hand to a model. A fifth of Astra's price for coding results this close is real money saved, not a one-off marketing benchmark. I would not brush off the shelved Astra either: a flagship model that kept acting without permission during testing is exactly why I keep my own agents on a short leash and check the result before it goes anywhere.