OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol 20% for 3 months: $4 in, $20 out
The frontier tier's first cut, aimed at Anthropic and Chinese rivals — plus a free stealth coder topping DeepSWE and an agents dashboard in Codex 0.149.
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The new Sol rate card
Input drops from $5 to $4, output from $30 to $20, and cached input from $0.50 to $0.40 per million tokens — output takes the biggest hit at a third off. The promo runs from Aug 21 through at least Nov 21.
Who gets the discount — and who doesn't
It applies to the API, Codex credits, and eligible ChatGPT Work plans. Pro, Plus, and Business subscriptions are unchanged — so this is a build-cost cut, not a subscriber perk.
Why OpenAI blinked
OpenAI tied the move to pressure from Anthropic and Chinese labs; for reference, Claude Fable 5 runs $10/$50 and Opus 5 $5/$25 per million. It follows late-July cuts of 20% on Terra and 80% on Luna.
Ox Alpha: a free stealth coder tops DeepSWE
An anonymous 1M-context model, stealth/ox-alpha, is free on OpenRouter during preview and reportedly scored ~80% on DeepSWE — ahead of Sol and Fable 5 in one developer's run. It takes text, image, and video in, with tool calling; the provider is undisclosed.
Codex 0.149 adds an agents dashboard
OpenAI's Codex CLI shipped an interactive agents dashboard and a codex queue, plus working-directory commands, better Vim editing, and improved session recovery. Worth updating to 0.149.0 if you drive agents from the terminal.