Trends

Frontier capability gets cheaper with every release

Model price-performance · Since Jul 3

Organizations

AnthropicOpenAIxAICursorGoogleGoogle DeepMind

Updates

  1. Oct 9

    Claude Haiku 5.5 runs about 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5, and OpenAI put GPT-6 Luna in front of ChatGPT's Free and Go users.

    Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5OpenAI brings GPT-6 to all ChatGPT users

  2. Oct 2

    GPT-6.1 Sol nears Astra at one-fifth of its price, Gemini 4 Argon launched at $2/$10 per million tokens, and Sonnet 5.5 runs up to 30% cheaper per task than Sonnet 5.

    OpenAI's GPT-6.1 SolGoogle's Gemini 4 ArgonAnthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5

  3. Sep 25

    Every major release this week led on cost: Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 at 40% lower run cost, GPT-6 Sol and Luna cut API prices 50%, and Grok 4.7 and MiMo-V2.6 held prior-generation prices.

    Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and LunaxAI's Grok 4.7Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6

  4. Jul 10

    GPT-5.6 went global with tiers from Luna at $1/$6 to Sol at $5/$30 per million tokens, and xAI's Grok 4.5 shipped at $2/$6 while resolving 64.7% of SWE-Bench Pro with about 4.2x fewer output tokens than Opus 4.8.

    OpenAI makes GPT-5.6 generally availablexAI's Grok 4.5

  5. Jul 3New

    Claude Sonnet 5 nears Opus 4.8 on agentic search and computer use at $2/$10 per million tokens introductory pricing and became the Free and Pro default, while Shanghai AI Lab's open 35B Agents-A1 matched or beat trillion-parameter models on long-horizon agent benchmarks.

    Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5Shanghai AI Lab's Agents-A1

Predictions

  1. Jan 2027

    Mid-tier models absorb the bulk of production agentic workloads, with flagship tiers reserved for the hardest long-horizon tasks. Jul 3

  2. Jan 2027

    Cost per completed task and token efficiency, not peak benchmark scores, become the primary axis of competition, and buyers route production agent workloads to mid-tier models by default. Jul 10

  3. Mar 2027

    Price-per-task at a fixed capability, and "default effort" mid-tiers, become the primary procurement axis, with headline benchmark deltas mattering less than cost-at-quality. Sep 25

  4. Apr 2027

    "Near-flagship at a fifth of the cost" becomes the default enterprise tier, and procurement continues to turn on cost-at-quality rather than peak benchmark deltas. Oct 2

  5. Apr 2027

    Per-task cost at a fixed capability becomes the dominant small-model axis, and near-flagship intelligence at commodity prices spreads from flagship tiers to high-volume subagent, summarization, and classification workloads. Oct 9