# AI Model Price War: Anthropic and OpenAI Cuts

**Podcast:** The AI Engineer Podcast
**Published:** 2026-09-23

## Transcript

Welcome to the podcast.
We have two big model drops today from both Anthropic and OpenAI.
I want to break down what these new models are doing and, you know, how much of a big deal they are.
The first one is coming from Anthropic.
They just launched Claude Opus 5.5.
The big headline, I think, on it is that it is a 20% price cut.
And it is better than, you know, the previous Opus models, obviously.
Apparently, it's better than Fable 5 in certain benchmarks.
So there's a bunch of interesting things going on there.
We also have OpenAI that has just shipped GPT-6 Sol and Luna.
So that's their two, I don't want to say like worst models, but like not their number one model, but their number two and number three models.
That is also going to be half the API prices of the 5.6 series models.
better models, cheaper prices.
But both of these cases aren't their big frontier models.
It's not their number one models.
It's just the smaller models that are more efficient and faster and cheaper.
So we're going to get into what everyone is saying about them on X.
One thing I wanted to mention is...
Every single week, I have a school community called AI Hustle where I talk about how I grow and scale my businesses using AI tools.
It's all the stuff I can't share publicly.
If you've ever wanted to start a business with AI or grow an existing business that you have with AI tools, I'd love for you to go check out the AI Hustle school community.
It's in the description.
I'll leave a link.
We have about 1,300 members and it is an amazing place.
People are sharing some really incredible insights about what they're working on, their businesses.
We share all the juicy stuff we can't share publicly, the revenue numbers, the workflows.
And, you know, I have like 100 videos in there.
Every single week, I make a video that I break down what I'm working on that week.
It's all in there.
There's a link to the AI Hustle School community in the description.
Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Anthropic.
What's interesting on this new model that they've put out is that the output tokens are going to drop from $20 per million or they're going to drop to $20 per million from 25.
So that's a 20% price improvement.
This new model is also going to be better than the larger Fable model on a bunch of different coding and knowledge tasks.
A lot of times when they're announcing these things, it's kind of their internal benchmarks.
So I would just say, you know, a word of caution there.
Not necessarily something that's going to be, you know, universally agreed upon.
A lot of times when they drop the model, they just like to tell everyone how good they internally have found their model.
I'm not saying they're doing that, but this is kind of...
kind of common.
One thing that is interesting though, Opus 5.5 is coming out just two months after Opus 5, which was in July 24th that came out.
So, I mean, they're making pretty solid and steady improvements on the models.
Two months later, they have, you know, after five, they have 5.5.
So they are moving.
They're really pushing as far as a company that's trying to quote unquote pace the frontier.
It feels like they are moving at a really fast speed.
Sonnet 5.5 and 5.5 Haiku are also going to come in the coming weeks.
And they both will apparently have very similar improvements.
What's interesting to me and also, I don't know, I actually don't love this, is the fact that, and maybe it just goes to show like how drastically different the training process is for the models or maybe the data sets that they're using.
But the thing I don't love is that we went from Anthropic having like three models, three different tiers, you know, low, medium, high.
And inside of each tier, you can kind of like crank up the intelligence level.
And then now we have added the whole new level.
which was we went from just having, you know, Haiku, Sonnet, Opus.
Then we added Fable.
And on top of that, we have Mythos, which is like the super hacking coding one that, you know, no one can get access to.
Anyway, so really Anthropic has like five models out there.
Although I suspect that Mythos and Fable are like some variation of the same model, just with different guardrails or limitations, but they give them different names.
So it's like, no, don't worry.
We only give the dangerous one to people that are approved.
In any case, I mean, they basically have five models and it gets really annoying and complicated when you're trying to remember the names.
OpenAI was accused of this for a very long time because we had, you know, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5.
And then we had, you know, all sorts of random names in there.
GPT-4, like, I mean, it just, it got a little ridiculous with the naming conventions.
And so it seems like OpenAI is copying Anthropic in a sense that they have.
kind of the small, medium, and large model sizes.
It feels like Gemini did the same thing.
So we have kind of the same, I guess we have the same idea.
And I do appreciate that OpenAI, it feels like for what it's worth, is sort of branded down to like kind of their like Sol and Terra and Luna and Astra.
So I guess they have four models too.
But I don't know if I like this.
It feels like Anthropic is now at five models and I would like us to stick to a simple three.
Is that too much to ask for?
Probably.
Okay.
Biology and cybersecurity capabilities are matching Mythos and that is triggering a bunch of the same safeguards for Anthropic that they're applying towards Fable models.
So apparently this model is pretty good as you'd suspect.
These things keep getting better and better.
They had a tweet that they put out today where they said, introducing Claude.
Opus 5.5, the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family.
It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5.
And that's basically the headline here is, I mean, Fable 5.1 just came out and they're like, look, it's just as good as Fable 5.1, which to be honest, I'm using Fable 5.
I'm not even using Fable 5.1.
I'm using Fable 5 for most everything on Anthropic because it just burns through too many tokens to use the best models.
So yeah, I think that...
Just going with this is going to probably give you some good boosts.
They said, Opus 5.5 is our first model since we called for pacing the frontier.
As with previous models, it was tested by external evaluators before release, including Meta and Frontier Design.
Our most comprehensive alignment test achieves the strongest score to date.
Opus 5.5 is a major step up from Opus 5 leading.
Leading on agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work.
Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that.
It's kind of interesting, though, because, I mean, I feel like we keep just, like, getting, you know, the colossal, like, a super inefficient model that's, like, super smart and super good, and that's great, whatever.
But then they're always like, look, you know, we just made it so 5.5 is like more efficient than five.
And it's like, like, whatever.
I mean, it's just a variation of the older, like, you're just.
You're giving us more efficient, but like older models, but the newer models, it's not like when, you know, opening eyes Astra or like Mythos comes out.
They're like, here's Mythos, the smartest model.
And it's like way more efficient.
Like, no, the newest models are always just as inefficient.
And then as they optimize the older models, they get more efficient, but they're kind of always in the same place.
And we're slowly, I guess, just getting more intelligent.
I don't know if there's much to complain about.
I mean, it's great.
This is what progress looks like.
But I just don't feel like it's this big headline.
Like it costs 40% less.
It's like.
fantastic until two months later when the next one comes out and then I'm not going to be using this 40% less one because it's going to seem dumb compared to the new one.
So whatever.
I digress here.
They said at its default effort settings, Opus 5.5 delivers frontier results for a fraction of the cost per task, often beating other models running at their highest settings.
It also generates outputs more than 30% faster than Opus 5.
And for that, I will actually say any day of the week.
You can tell me how much more efficient or inefficient the model is, but if it is 30% faster, I will say congratulations.
I'm actually really excited about that.
I hate waiting as we all do and 30% faster is like real time savings and real gains.
They also tweeted, Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally, addresses some of the most common feedback we've heard on Opus 5.
It puts the most important information up front and follows the writing rules you give it, which makes long sessions easier to follow.
They said together these advances make it.
you know, 5.5, a noticeably better collaborator.
We're excited to see what you build, blah, blah, blah.
They got a whole post on there.
And we do have Elon saying congrats.
I think it's kind of funny, you know, Elon could have been their worst nightmare, their biggest enemy, kind of like open AI.
But because, I mean, I guess, I guess, you know, he didn't invest in them early on and they kind of cut him out of the deal.
So that would probably make anyone salty.
But they're also one of his biggest customers at his Colossus data center where they pay him almost a billion dollars.
a month or maybe a little over a billion dollars a month for compute.
So anytime Anthropik comes out with a new model, Elon saying congrats.
Anytime Sam Alman comes out with a new model, it feels like Elon is saying you stole this company from me.
So anyways, I do appreciate the comment section on all of these.
And yeah, the comments are pretty much what you'd expect on all that.
Okay, we also have big news though out of OpenAI who not to be outdone released their own improvements on their tier two, I guess you could call them models and get this.
This all came out an hour and a half or 90 minutes after Anthropic put theirs out.
Opening AI came out and put their new update out as well.
So they shipped GPT-6, Sol and Luna.
It's half the API price.
So I think Anthropic went down 40%.
Opening AI is like look, we can beat you.
We'll do 50.
We'll do half the price, 50%.
It is the quote unquote smaller sibling of the GPT-6 Astra.
And it is going to be a lot smarter, have the price cut.
And of course, yeah, this is coming just a couple hours after Anthropix.
So there is definitely a little bit of friendly competition going on right here.
Sol's is right now targeting complex coding work.
Luna is aimed at high volume clerical tasks.
So it's doing things like summarization and extraction.
Both of the models are live in ChatGPT work codecs and the ChatGPT API, which hallelujah, I really do appreciate when we release the model and get it in the API right away.
Luna is also going to be for free and go users in the desktop app.
I mean, that makes sense.
They're lower tier models.
They're going to get them to people as soon as possible.
OpenAI tweeting about this said, please welcome the new model.
GPT-6 Sol and Luna build on advances behind GPT-6 Extra, bringing much of its strength into faster and more affordable models to support work at scale.
We've also made caching and inference more efficient, and we're passing that savings directly on to you.
50% lower API prices for Sol and Luna compared to GPT-5.6 promotional pricing.
Also, the promotional pricing is funny because it's like, whatever, it's just like, it's cheaper compared to the pricing that we're giving you, which is on discount, and we, you know, reserve the right to increase but whatever sam altman tweeting about this said gpt-6 sol and luna are big improvements on intelligence alignment uh work output coding computer use and more over their 5.6 family predecessors they also are half the price token and even less per task comments on this are so maria said huh is gpt-6 sol just worse than astra which i mean yeah basically someone said tell gpt6 soul to paint to open paint in a browser and try to draw you and they have image where it's allegedly doing that and it it looks great but i just feel like it's probably pretty fake there is sam allman retweeting a bunch of different stuff so yeah it looks like we have you know a whole bunch of new models coming out from basically everybody this week.
We had a massive launch from Mew Spark.
We had Grok 4.7 that recently came out.
We had GPT-6 Sol.
We had the new models from Anthropic.
And so, yeah, it appears like we have a whole bunch of new models to test out this week.
I've been playing with a handful of them.
These ones just came out.
though, about three hours ago.
So they're pretty new.
People are sharing some of the examples of things that they're doing with them.
But at the end of the day, I think these examples, like anytime we have these kind of like, I guess you'd call them tier two models or tier two and tier three models coming out.
It's a little bit less exciting, in my opinion, because the like when they're like, oh, look, we have the brand new Astra model out.
The thing is like, you know, and then everyone's trying their demos are like, look, I got to one shot this crazy game and I rebuilt GT, you know, GTA six with it and blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, people are just doing their wild demos because it's the best model.
So they're pushing it to the limits.
When these new ones come out, no one's like, guys, check out the way that I like saved 40% on like the task that I was already doing.
That's kind of like boring and mundane.
Like, I think that those are real improvements in the industry that people are getting a lot of value out of them.
but you just see less exciting stuff.
And at the end of the day, when you're low on tokens, which happens to me constantly, like I'm using ChatGPT work to get a lot of my work done.
It's basically, I think, my prime computer use model right now.
But I'll burn through all of my tokens in two days.
And then I have to wait for reset, which I just inevitably switch over to Claude or now Muse.
Muse is actually a big shout out to Muse.
They're doing amazing.
Never thought I'd say that about a meta product.
Go try them out if you haven't already.
It's free and it's like Claude Cowork and Chatship Twork.
But in any case, yeah, the better models, they have the splashier demos.
But I think once for me, like when I run out of all the credits on the best models, like the Astras, I'm going to go down to these new models that they've launched.
I'm going to be using GPT-6 Soul and GPT-6 Luna.
I mean, depending on how many credits, if I'm really, you know, if I'm really hurting bad with.
5% credits left, I'll probably just switch everything off to Luna and only try to ask a few questions here and there.
I think probably a lot of people, if they're using it with these kind of subsidized subscription plans, they'll be doing that.
And it's kind of the best use case for a lot of these.
But for big enterprises, when you have massive scale projects and you don't need the best reasoning model, I think that these models will do great for a lot of different tasks.
Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
Make sure if you want to...
If you want to join the school community where I talk every week about how I'm growing and scaling my business with AI tools, all the AI tools I use, how much revenue my different businesses are making, all my different side hustles and how I'm helping people become AI consultants and make money with AI, go join the AI Hustle School community.
It's only $19 a month.
I made it super affordable and it is linked in the description.
All right, catch you guys all in the next episode.