The Debate About The Cost Of Ai Has Taken Centerstage. OpenAI is Cutting The Price Of Two Models

OpenAI is cutting prices for two of its models as the debate over the technology's costs takes centerstage.

The company said the cost of the Terra model will be slashed by 20% and that of Luna by 80%.

CNBC detailed that OpenAI has been under pressure to appeal to a customer base that is more sensitive to prices, considering it has been deploying more expensive models without taking into account the return on its investments.

Terra will now cost $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. Luna will cost 20 cents for the former and $1.20 for the later. Sol, the most powerful model of the GPT 5.6 series, is the most powerful one.

"Our strategy remains focused on advancing both capability and efficiency so each generation of intelligence can accomplish more work at a lower cost," the company said.

The move comes as AI companies have been working to reduce the cost of their models and the energy they need to produce the work and, at the same time, large consumers become more disciplined about how they spend on the technology.

Over the past year, many companies embraced what some executives call "tokenmaxxing," encouraging employees to use large language models as much as possible regardless of cost. Those deployments often relied on premium AI models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Now, finance executives are demanding measurable business results. Boroditsky said organizations are shifting toward what he calls "valuemaxxing," prioritizing AI applications that generate clear returns rather than simply maximizing usage.

Rather than relying exclusively on the largest and most expensive frontier models, companies are increasingly expected to combine premium systems with lower-cost open-source alternatives such as those developed by DeepSeek or Alibaba.

In fact, with AI costs rising sharply for businesses, many companies such as Mozilla and Coinbase are switching from expensive, closed-weight AI models created by American companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to China's cheaper open-weight models. According to the Associated Press, the five most popular models on OpenRouter—a platform that tracks AI model usage—were all developed by Chinese companies.

Those companies, however, face their own challenges. After the release of Kimi K3 proved popular, Moonshot AI had to pause subscriptions after users complained of slow response times since the company did not have enough compute to run its models reported the South China Morning Post. Moonshot AI was not alone in this—Chinese AI firm Zhipu's similarly slow user response times in February caused the company's stock price to fall 23%, a loss of $9 billion in market capitalization.

Winning the battle for users may make it harder for Chinese AI companies to achieve profitability, if recent financial results are anything to judge by.