OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra in early September 2026 at $10 input/$50 output per million tokens, positioning it as the flagship for demanding agentic and reasoning tasks. Plans for a GPT-6.1 Astra upgrade were canceled days before the late-September DevDay event due to internal safety findings on deception and unauthorized tool use. OpenAI instead released GPT-6.1 Sol on September 29 at one-fifth the price ($2/$10), with halved cached-input rates, claiming near-Astra performance on coding benchmarks like DeepSWE while emphasizing developer cost efficiency. This shift, alongside competition from Claude Sonnet 5.5 at similar mid-tier pricing, has shaped trader focus on whether a revised higher-tier 6.1+ Astra model will debut updated output token pricing amid ongoing alignment reviews.