Snaxbyte-sized news, on the go
Mistral previewed a trillion-parameter model and promised open weights within the month. It has not said yet what licence those weights will carry. OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of every ChatGPT tier at once. The model now decides whether an answer should be text, a chart, or a tool you can click. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku’s price by up to 90 percent and gave it a 1 million token context window. The cheap-model tier of the price war just got a lot more capable. Anthropic says an Istanbul firm used Claude to run a paid political operation aimed at Malaysian voters. Its report found no sign the campaign reached real communities. The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term. Claude for Government left public beta on 30 September 2026. Anthropic is now selling Washington a spending cap, not just a chatbot. OpenAI says it will not release a flagship model it had been testing. The company that races itself on capability now says it will also lose to its own safety bar. DeepSeek shipped a new small model on a new architecture. It undercuts its own flagship on price, not just rivals. Mistral previewed a trillion-parameter model and promised open weights within the month. It has not said yet what licence those weights will carry. OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of every ChatGPT tier at once. The model now decides whether an answer should be text, a chart, or a tool you can click. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku’s price by up to 90 percent and gave it a 1 million token context window. The cheap-model tier of the price war just got a lot more capable. Anthropic says an Istanbul firm used Claude to run a paid political operation aimed at Malaysian voters. Its report found no sign the campaign reached real communities. The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term. Claude for Government left public beta on 30 September 2026. Anthropic is now selling Washington a spending cap, not just a chatbot. OpenAI says it will not release a flagship model it had been testing. The company that races itself on capability now says it will also lose to its own safety bar. DeepSeek shipped a new small model on a new architecture. It undercuts its own flagship on price, not just rivals.
Model prices /1M out
GPT-5.6 Luna $1.20 —
Qwen3.8-Max $6.00 —
Mistral Medium 3.5 $7.50 —
Claude Sonnet 5 $10.00 —
GPT-5.6 Terra $12.00 —
GPT-5.6 Sol $20.00 —
Claude Opus 5 $25.00 —
Claude Fable 5 $50.00 —
AI MODEL PROFILE

GPT-5.6 Sol

OpenAI's top tier model, and the one to reach for when the problem is genuinely hard rather than merely long.

Source review Last reviewed October 7, 2026 By OpenAI

The facts at a glance

ProviderOpenAI
TypeFrontier reasoning model
Current version or tiergpt-5.6-sol, generally available 9 July 2026
ModalityText and image in, text out
AccessProprietary
Context or limits1,050,000 token context, 128,000 max output, knowledge cutoff 16 February 2026
Free optionNo free route. Excluded from the API free tier and from ChatGPT Free at launch
Paid priceUSD 4.00 per million input tokens and USD 20.00 per million output tokens, a promotional rate OpenAI states is available at least through 21 November 2026, down from the USD 5.00/30.00 standard rate this profile previously recorded.

Pricing last checked October 7, 2026. Prices change and vary by region. Check the official pricing page ↗

Assessment

What it does well

  • OpenAI reports state of the art results across coding, knowledge work, cybersecurity, and science
  • Very large 1.05 million token context for whole repository and whole corpus work
  • Cached input is billed at USD 0.50 per million, a tenth of the standard input rate

Where it falls short

  • Fine tuning is not supported
  • Requests above 272,000 input tokens are billed at twice the input rate and 1.5 times the output rate, so the full context is far more expensive than the headline price suggests
  • No free access route at all

Privacy and data control

API data handling follows OpenAI platform terms, which differ from the consumer ChatGPT settings. Confirm the terms for your specific account type before sending sensitive material.

The longer read

Where it fits

Sol is the top of the GPT-5.6 family. OpenAI positions it as its strongest model for coding, knowledge work, cybersecurity, and science, and it shares the 1.05 million token context window with the rest of the family.

The pricing detail that catches people out

The headline rate applies below 272,000 input tokens. Above that threshold OpenAI bills input at twice the rate and output at 1.5 times. If your plan depends on routinely using the full million token window, model the cost at the higher rate rather than the advertised one.

How it performs by outcome

We assess products against a job, not a leaderboard. These are the outcomes this entry is compared under.

Worth comparing against

Gemini 3.6 Flash Work that mixes documents, images, audio, and video in one request Gemini 3.1 Pro Abstract reasoning problems and research inside the Google ecosystem Grok 4.5 Terminal and agentic coding work where token efficiency matters DeepSeek-V4-Flash Teams that need to run a capable model on their own infrastructure

How this profile was produced

Source review. Every fact here is drawn from the provider documentation linked below and checked on the date shown. We have not yet run this entry through a controlled test, and no scoring is implied.

Read the full review methodology →

Primary sources