Strengths
- Half the price of GPT-6.1 Sol ($1 input, $5 output per million tokens) and 51 points on the Artificial Analysis index, 12th of 52.
- OpenAI says that at medium effort it matches GPT-6 Astra on Agents' Last Exam at a tenth of the price and finishes tasks more than three times faster.
- The most recent knowledge in the GPT-6 family, up to June 2026.
- Thinking can be switched off completely, which saves time and money on simple tasks.
Weaknesses
- OpenAI itself recommends GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Astra for the most complex coding.
- Wordy. It produced 99 million output tokens on the Artificial Analysis test, and you pay for output.
- Not in regular ChatGPT chat. At launch OpenAI listed it for Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu, but not for Business.
Best for
- automating work in software, such as entering invoices into accounting tools
- reading images and technical drawings
- everyday writing and office work
Not ideal for
- the hardest software engineering work
How to use it in Europe
In ChatGPT it comes with Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu, only in ChatGPT Work and Codex, not in regular chat. Developers and companies use it through the OpenAI API, which is available in Slovakia and Czechia. If you need data processed in a specific region such as the EU, the API charges 10% more.
Price compared with similar models
Benchmark results
| Benchmark | Score | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 | 51 (#12 of 52) | artificialanalysis.ai ↗, October 2026 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (max effort) | 50.3% | openai.com ↗, October 2026 |
Benchmarks cover only a narrow slice of ability and vendors often report them at their best settings. Treat them as a rough guide.
More models from this vendor
- GPT-6 Astra: OpenAI's most capable model, built for the hardest coding, agents that operate a computer and very long documents.
- GPT-6.1 Sol: OpenAI's balanced model, close to GPT-6 Astra in quality at a fifth of the price. A solid pick for business apps.
- GPT-6 Luna: OpenAI's cheapest model, made for high volumes of simple tasks, sorting text and low-cost chatbots.
- gpt-oss-120b: OpenAI's open model that a company can run on its own server when data must not leave its infrastructure.
- gpt-oss-20b: OpenAI's smaller open model that runs on a computer with 16 GB of memory, even without internet access.
Similar models from other vendors
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (Anthropic): Claude's cheapest and fastest model, built for classification, data extraction and large volumes of simple tasks.
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (DeepSeek): DeepSeek's cheap, fast open-weight model with a 1 million token window. In the app and API, though, your data goes to China.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google): A very fast, low-cost Google model for large volumes of simple tasks, such as pulling data out of documents.
- Mistral Small 4 (Mistral AI): Mistral's cheap, fast open model under Apache 2.0 for everyday tasks through the API or on your own server.
- Qwen3.8-Flash (Alibaba (Qwen)): A very cheap, fast Qwen model for high volumes of tasks. Unlike Max and Plus, it runs in Frankfurt with processing kept in the EU.
- Grok 4.3 (xAI): An older, cheaper Grok from April 2026 with a 1-million-token window. Good for lots of low-cost API calls.