GPT-5.6 price cut by 20%-80%: March's flagship intelligence now costs 1/13th the token price

[AINews] GPT 5.6 price cut by 20%-80%: Cost of GPT 5.4 Intelligence dropped 13x in 4 months due to GPT 5.6 recursive self-optimization

OpenAI slashed GPT-5.6 Luna to $0.20/$1.20 per million tokens, an 80% drop. Terra fell 20%, and Sol got a 2.5x faster mode at 2x the price. Luna now matches GPT-5.4's March xhigh score of 51 on the AA benchmark, at roughly 1/13th the token cost. The cuts follow GPT-5.6 rewriting its own Triton and Gluon production kernels, saving 20% end-to-end, plus speculative decoding and KV cache improvements. The post notes an annualized ~2000x cost decline but warns public benchmarks like AA may be partially trained on, so discount the headline a bit.

Why it matters: A 13x cost reduction for equivalent intelligence in four months is a major industry signal. The AA benchmark score of 51 directly ties Luna to GPT-5.4's full reasoning performance, making the price cut concrete rather than marketing fluff. The post doesn't detail the recursive...