- OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra, a mid-range model priced at half the API cost of its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Terra.
- Terra charges $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, versus $2 and $12 for GPT-5.6 Terra and $2 and $10 for Claude Sonnet 5.5.
- Artificial Analysis says Terra gains six points on its Intelligence Index over GPT-5.6 Terra while costing less than a third per task.
- On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 coding benchmark, Terra solves 50.3% of tasks at maximum reasoning effort, up from 21.5% for GPT-5.6 Terra.
What Happened
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra, a mid-range model the company positions as its best price-to-performance option yet, The Decoder reported (Oct 26, 2026). The model is available now for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users, in Codex, and through the API.
Why It Matters
Terra’s pricing undercuts both OpenAI’s own prior mid-tier model and Anthropic‘s Claude Sonnet 5.5, pushing competition toward cost per task rather than raw capability — a shift also visible in OpenAI’s GPT-6 Sol and Luna launch and its scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra release. Analysis firm Artificial Analysis calls Terra a new benchmark for intelligence per dollar.
Technical Details
Input tokens cost $1 per million and output tokens $5 per million, with cached inputs at $0.05 per million — a quarter of the prior rate. At maximum reasoning effort, Terra scores 48 on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index, between GPT-6.1 Sol (52) and GPT-5.6 Terra (42), while costing $0.40 per task versus $1.40 for its predecessor. On the private AA-Omniscience benchmark, Terra guesses when it lacks an answer 38% of the time, down from 88% for GPT-5.6 Terra.
Who’s Affected
Developers running high-volume office-automation and computer-control workloads get a cheaper model that OpenAI says matches GPT-6 Astra’s performance on the Agents’ Last Exam benchmark at one-tenth the token price. OpenAI still recommends GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Astra for the most demanding coding tasks, the company said.
What’s Next
OpenAI has not announced plans to extend Terra’s pricing model to its larger Sol and Astra tiers. Artificial Analysis says it will continue benchmarking Terra against competing mid-tier models as adoption data comes in.
