OpenAI

Meet Sol and Luna

Both models build on GPT-6 Astra, the flagship OpenAI released earlier this month, bringing “much of its strengths into faster and more affordable models,” the company says.

• GPT-6 Sol is the all-rounder, aimed at complex work like interactive and agentic coding.
• GPT-6 Luna is the lightweight option, for “high-volume tasks with a clear goal, like summarizing documents, extracting information, or answering quick questions.” It’s the cheapest model in the GPT-6 family.

GPT-6 Sol makes about half as many mistakes as its predecessor, reaching Astra-level reliability at much lower cost.

OpenAI

The price cut

The headline number is price. Per million tokens, the new API rates are:

• GPT-6 Sol: $2 input, $10 output
• GPT-6 Luna: $0.10 input, $0.50 output

That’s 50% below the promotional pricing of the GPT-5.6 models, a cut OpenAI attributes to improvements in caching and inference. “We want the OpenAI API to feature the best model at every price point and modality,” CEO Sam Altman said, according to Pulse 2.0.

The benchmarks, and a catch

At its highest reasoning setting, OpenAI says Sol scores 33.2% on AutomationBench, a test of business workflows, at about $0.27 per task. It also reports 56.4% on Agents’ Last Exam, 60.5% on the OSWorld 2.0 computer-use benchmark, and 68.8% on the DeepSWE v1.1 software engineering test, where Luna isn’t far behind at 66.6%.

OpenAI claims the new models beat Anthropic’s Fable and Opus models. But the head-to-head numbers it published compare Sol with Claude Opus 5, which scored 26.9% on AutomationBench at 11 times the cost per task. That’s the model Anthropic replaced 90 minutes before OpenAI’s announcement, so how Sol stacks up against the brand-new Opus 5.5 is still an open question.

Anthropic’s move

Claude Opus 5.5 is the first model in Anthropic’s new 5.5 family. The company says it performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work, costs 40% less to run than Opus 5, and generates output more than 30% faster. Its API price drops to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.

Anthropic is also removing the five-hour usage caps for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise subscribers, and says Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 will follow within weeks, TechCrunch reports.

How to get them

GPT-6 Sol and Luna are available now in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu subscribers, and rolling out to the ChatGPT app and website throughout the day. Free and Go users can use Luna in the ChatGPT desktop app. Developers can call them in the API as gpt-6-sol and gpt-6-luna, and both are already available in GitHub Copilot.

Sources: OpenAI, TechCrunch, Decrypt, Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch (Opus 5.5), GitHub

The pitch: let AI fix AI

Automated research could also help us substantially improve alignment and build defenses against increasingly capable AI—an automated AI researcher can also be an automated AI safety researcher.

OpenAI

This isn’t a distant idea. OpenAI says it has already hit its goal of building an “automated research intern,” which it describes as “a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days,” according to Engadget. The next target is a full automated AI researcher by March 2028.

The catch

The risk is what researchers call recursive self-improvement, or RSI: the point where AI systems meaningfully improve themselves through their own work rather than human effort. OpenAI doesn’t sugarcoat it.

Done without appropriate care and caution, RSI could result in humans losing practical control over AI development, unable to provide oversight on research processes they no longer understand.

OpenAI

The company says RSI “should not be pursued unless and until it can be done safely.”

The one thing it’s asking for

OpenAI’s ask is shared rules: national and international standards for AI safety, including common ways to evaluate self-improving systems, human oversight of automated research, and a system to classify, track and report incidents. It also wants secure channels so countries can warn each other about emerging threats.

It wants the U.S. to lead that effort, through the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, arguing that America’s AI industry is at the technical frontier.

Leading now will determine whether the United States shapes the global AI framework or watches a fragmented, uneven, and conflict-ridden system take hold around it.

OpenAI

Washington isn’t in a slowing-down mood

The timing is tricky. A day after OpenAI’s post, President Trump used his UN speech to say he’d “encourage it, not rein it in,” and rejected any “globalist scheme to control” AI. His administration is, however, working on an AI incident hotline with China, and Trump is due to meet Xi Jinping later this week.

Getting Beijing on board with American-led standards won’t be easy. “China is deeply suspicious of anything that looks like it’s designed to lock in U.S. advantages,” Edgard Kagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told NBC16.

Others doubt standards go far enough. “We already have all of the evidence that we need that says that we don’t know how to do this safely,” said Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

It’s also a notable ask from a company whose own models were involved in the Hugging Face security breach during testing earlier this year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is scheduled to brief the UN Security Council on Wednesday, where UN Secretary-General António Guterres has already set the tone: “National action is essential. But global coordination is also indispensable.”

Sources: OpenAI, The Independent, France 24, NBC16, Engadget