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OpenAI Launches GPT-6.1 Sol, Says It Nearly Matches Flagship Astra at One-Fifth the Price

Announced September 29, 2026 at DevDay, GPT-6.1 Sol is an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol that OpenAI says approaches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work — while keeping Sol's low token price.

2026-09-29 · by Moe Ameen

What happened

On September 29, 2026, at its DevDay event, OpenAI introduced GPT-6.1 Sol, an upgrade to the GPT-6 Sol model it had released just a week earlier on September 22. The pitch is a value one: OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol reaches nearly the same level of intelligence as its flagship GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work, while costing about one-fifth as much for standard input and output tokens.

The pricing lands GPT-6.1 Sol at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens — the same standard rates as GPT-6 Sol — with cached input cut in half to $0.10 per million (from $0.20). Against GPT-6 Astra's $10 input and $50 output, those standard prices are exactly one-fifth. OpenAI's argument is that you no longer need to pay flagship rates for most agentic and professional work. On its internal factuality measure the model's error rate lands within about 1.9% of Astra across reasoning settings, and at low reasoning effort OpenAI reported the error rate dropping from 11.4% on GPT-6 Sol to 7.7% on GPT-6.1 Sol. It also cited benchmark parity with Astra on a software-engineering evaluation and a near-match on a computer-use test at maximum reasoning.

GPT-6.1 Sol is available through the API as `gpt-6.1-sol` and is rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users inside ChatGPT Work and Codex — not yet in the standard Chat surface. OpenAI said an "Ultrafast" variant that generates tokens much faster, at a higher price, is due in the coming days. Notably, the company said it scrapped a planned GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns during testing. Treat the exact benchmark figures, pricing, and rollout timing as a launch-window snapshot and confirm them against OpenAI's own pages before relying on them.

Why it matters for creators

  • Frontier-tier accuracy dropped to a commodity price. A model that approaches flagship reliability at one-fifth the cost means the floor for a good first draft just rose for everyone at once — the copy layer of a content pipeline got both sharper and cheaper.
  • Fewer mistakes means a shorter review pass. With a factual-error rate close to Astra's, the drafts a model hands you need less catching and rewriting before anything is fit to publish.
  • It lives in Codex and ChatGPT Work, not standard Chat. The launch is aimed at builders and professional workflows first, so the immediate beneficiaries are people wiring a model into a pipeline rather than casual chat users.
  • It is still a text and reasoning model. GPT-6.1 Sol renders no video, carousels, or images and publishes to no platform. The distance between a strong draft and a finished, scheduled post is unchanged.
  • The differentiator keeps moving downstream. When frontier-level drafting is cheap for everyone, what sets a creator apart is how fast they turn drafts into on-brand posts across platforms — production and distribution, not the raw generation.

How to act on this with Kompozy

The useful way to read this launch is not "a smarter model" but "frontier-tier drafting at a commodity price." That lands squarely at the copy layer of a content pipeline, which is exactly where [Kompozy](/) already puts an OpenAI or Claude model to work: drafting captions, text posts, blog articles, and newsletter bodies governed by a [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) so the words read like you and respect your banned-word list. A model whose factual-error rate now approaches the flagship's means fewer weak drafts reaching Kompozy's per-post review gate — and on the Founding tier, where you bring your own key, GPT-6.1 Sol's low token price directly cuts what it costs to generate copy in bulk. The practical move today is to let the cheaper, sharper model do the drafting and keep your attention on approving output.

But a near-Astra model still just returns text — it ships nothing. Kompozy is the layer that turns that text into finished, published content: from one idea it generates [Persona Shorts](/glossary/persona-shorts), [Clipped Shorts](/glossary/clipped-short), brand-exact [Carousel Posts](/glossary/hyperframes), Quote Graphics, and full blogs and newsletters across [18 formats](/glossary/output-buckets), then schedules and publishes them across the eight social platforms plus blog and email on [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot). When the model underneath gets this much cheaper and more reliable, the economics of the whole pipeline improve — but the thing that decides whether you actually post consistently is still the engine that produces and distributes the content, not the tokens beneath it. For the model this upgrades, see our coverage of [GPT-6 Sol and Luna](/news/openai-gpt-6-sol-and-luna-launch); for the flagship it chases, [GPT-6 Astra](/news/openai-gpt-6-astra-launch).

Quick takeaways

  • GPT-6.1 Sol launched September 29, 2026 at DevDay as an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol (released September 22), aimed at agentic coding, computer use, and professional work.
  • OpenAI says it nearly matches flagship GPT-6 Astra at one-fifth the standard token price — $2 input and $10 output per million, with cached input halved to $0.10.
  • On OpenAI's internal factuality measure the error rate lands within about 1.9% of Astra, and at low reasoning effort dropped from 11.4% (GPT-6 Sol) to 7.7%.
  • It is in the API as gpt-6.1-sol and in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu — not yet standard Chat; an Ultrafast variant is due soon.
  • It is a text/reasoning model — no video, images, or publishing. Turning drafts into finished, scheduled posts across platforms is a separate job, which is what Kompozy automates.

Frequently asked questions

What is GPT-6.1 Sol?

GPT-6.1 Sol is an upgrade to OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol model, announced September 29, 2026 at DevDay. OpenAI says it nearly matches the flagship GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work while costing about one-fifth as much for standard tokens. It is a text and reasoning model, aimed first at builders in Codex and ChatGPT Work.

How much does GPT-6.1 Sol cost?

OpenAI listed GPT-6.1 Sol at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens — the same standard rate as GPT-6 Sol — with cached input cut to $0.10 per million. Against GPT-6 Astra's $10 input and $50 output, those standard prices are exactly one-fifth. Confirm current figures on OpenAI's own pricing pages.

How is GPT-6.1 Sol different from GPT-6 Sol?

It keeps GPT-6 Sol's standard token price but improves accuracy and agentic performance to near-flagship levels, halves cached-input cost, and OpenAI reports a lower factual-error rate. At low reasoning effort the error rate dropped from 11.4% on GPT-6 Sol to 7.7% on GPT-6.1 Sol, and it matched flagship Astra on a software-engineering benchmark.

Can GPT-6.1 Sol publish content to social media?

No. GPT-6.1 Sol is a text and reasoning model — it drafts, codes, and analyzes, but generates no video or images and publishes to no platform. To turn its drafts into finished, scheduled posts across platforms, you pair it with a content engine like Kompozy that generates video, carousels, and posts from one idea and publishes across nine platforms.

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