# OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 in Three Tiers: Sol, Terra, Luna

> OpenAI has released GPT-5.6 as a family rather than a single model, splitting it into three tiers. Sol is the flagship, with an Ultra subagent mode and pricing of 5 dollars per million input tokens and 30 per million output. Terra offers roughly GPT-5.5-level quality at about half the cost, and Luna is the fast, cheap tier built for high-volume work where speed matters more than raw capability. The tiering is the real signal. As the frontier flattens, the competition is shifting from who has the single best model to who can slice capability into the right price and speed points for different jobs. Most workloads do not need the flagship, and a cheaper tier that is fast and close enough is often the smarter default. On the headline benchmark, Sol reaches 7.8 percent on ARC-AGI-3, a reminder that even the best models remain far from the kinds of general reasoning these tests are designed to probe. The launch cleared a Commerce Department review before shipping, another sign of how entangled model releases have become with policy.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: ThursdAI · Published Tuesday, July 21, 2026_

## Wortins' read

OpenAI has released GPT-5.6 as a family rather than a single model, splitting it into three tiers. Sol is the flagship, with an Ultra subagent mode and pricing of 5 dollars per million input tokens and 30 per million output. Terra offers roughly GPT-5.5-level quality at about half the cost, and Luna is the fast, cheap tier built for high-volume work where speed matters more than raw capability. The tiering is the real signal. As the frontier flattens, the competition is shifting from who has the single best model to who can slice capability into the right price and speed points for different jobs. Most workloads do not need the flagship, and a cheaper tier that is fast and close enough is often the smarter default. On the headline benchmark, Sol reaches 7.8 percent on ARC-AGI-3, a reminder that even the best models remain far from the kinds of general reasoning these tests are designed to probe. The launch cleared a Commerce Department review before shipping, another sign of how entangled model releases have become with policy.

## Source

[Read the full story at ThursdAI](https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-07)

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