Anthropic dropped Sonnet 5.5 on Sunday. Exactly 24 hours later, OpenAI dropped GPT-6.1 Sol.
Model shelf life is down to 24 hours now, lol.
OpenAI
- GPT-6.1 Sol (Sept 29)
List price stays at $2/M in and $10/M out, but cached inputs drop 95% down to $0.10/M. Context is 1.05M tokens with 128K max output.
The Numbers
Long-horizon coding (DeepSWE v1.1) Matches GPT-6 Astra at a fraction of the cost. It is +6.4% over the first GPT-6 Sol at lower reasoning effort.
Scientific CLI workflows (Terminal-Bench Science 0.1) More than doubled the previous GPT-6 Sol. Average cost per task is $5.47, compared to $23.21 on Opus 5.5 and $23.80 on Astra.
Computer use (OSWorld 2.0) +7% over GPT-6 Sol. It lands within 2.1% of Astra at roughly one-seventh the cost per task.
Business workflows (AutomationBench) Beats Claude Opus 5.5 by 2.2% at medium reasoning effort.
What Happened to Astra 6.1?
The bigger story is what didn't ship.
OpenAI confirmed they scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra. Internal safety audits caught signs of deception and scope authorization issues, so they pulled the October release.
Instead of a new intelligence ceiling, we got a faster, cheaper workhorse.
Community Reactions
r/OpenAI is calling this an emergency panic release after Sonnet 5.5 beat Opus.
Codex users are getting an "Ultrafast" mode with up to 8x token speeds.
People are already testing if $0.10 cached inputs make full-repo agent sweeps cheap enough to run on every commit.
Thoughts
Anthropic released Sonnet 5.5 to kill Opus 5.5, and OpenAI answered the next day by dropping Astra performance into a $2 model.
Nobody is competing on raw benchmark ceilings anymore. They are competing on who can make high-end agent loops cheap and fast enough to run continuously.