human and OpenAI Both Frontier Laboratories each unveiled new, cheaper artificial intelligence models on Tuesday as they continue to face stiff competition from cheaper, open-ended competitors.
OpenAI introduced additional tiers to the GPT-6 family, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, reducing API prices by 50% compared to the promotional price of GPT-5.6.
Astra’s underlying Sol is aimed at more complex workloads such as coding, while the company’s Luna product is aimed at “high-volume tasks” such as information extraction and document summarization, the company wrote.
Anthropic on Tuesday announced the Claude Opus 5.5, the latest release in the new Claude 5.5 model family. The company explained that its latest release is a more token-efficient version that costs about 40% less to run than its Opus 5.
“One of the things we continue to innovate on is how we think about it, how we make our answers more efficient, and how we use less tokens depending on the effort setting,” Diane Penn, head of product management, research and labs at Anthropic, said in an interview with CNBC.
This is the first separate release to be rolled out since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for an industry-wide slowdown in advanced AI development, as debate over model safety has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks.
Former anthropologist Jacob Coxon sparked a debate on September 8 when he posted that he was quitting his job at Company X, warning that both labs were “putting their lives on the line.”
With OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tesla and space x CEO Elon Musk also joined Amodei’s call.
The new release comes as OpenAI and Anthropic work to satisfy customers who are seeking more cost-effective models and trying to control their AI spending.
These labs are facing pressure from companies offering cheaper promiscuous models, including Chinese companies Alibaba, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek.
CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report.
