OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Terra halves API prices to $1 per million

GPT-6.1 Terra arrives as OpenAI's answer to the mid-tier price band where Anthropic's Sonnet series has been a reference point. At $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, the new model undercuts both Claude Sonnet 5.5 and OpenAI's own GPT-5.6 Terra, while cached inputs drop to $0.05 per million tokens. That pricing places Terra in direct comparison with Sonnet 5.5 rather than with the larger frontier models.

The release also extends OpenAI's tiering strategy. Terra sits below GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI still recommends for the most demanding coding tasks, yet it inherits safeguards from GPT-6 Astra and meets the company's "Critical" cybersecurity threshold under its Preparedness Framework. OpenAI says the model is more likely than its predecessor to stay within assigned boundaries and disclose restrictions to users.

The company's emphasis on automated software control and everyday work tasks, from drafting proposals to filling out forms, suggests Terra is aimed at routine agentic workloads rather than peak-capability benchmarks. Whether that positioning holds will depend on how developers weigh its lower per-task cost against the stronger results of Sol and Astra on the hardest tasks.