OpenAI aims to enhance AI quality while lowering prices, says Sam Altman

OpenAI is doing something that sounds paradoxically simple for a company burning through billions in compute costs: making its AI models better and cheaper at the same time. CEO Sam Altman has laid out a vision where the company delivers what he calls “the greatest and the cheapest” in AI. The strategy is already producing tangible results. On July 30, 2026, OpenAI slashed API pricing for its GPT-5.6 family of models, cutting the Luna model’s costs by 80% and Terra’s by 20%. Luna now runs at $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. Terra sits at $2 and $12 respectively. The volume play is working After the price reductions, Luna consumption surged roughly 14-fold, while the effective price dropped by about 10-fold. The math works out to approximately a 34% increase in Luna revenue, even though each individual API call costs a fraction of what it used to. Altman explained the logic during a late July 2026 podcast appearance, noting that OpenAI is focused on distilling its larger models into smaller, cheaper versions. The goal is maintaining competitive performance while dramatically reducing the cost to serve each request. In certain benchmarks, the compan...