OpenAI Outlines EU AI Act Compliance Practices

OpenAI has cut prices on two models in its GPT-5.6 series: Luna by 80% to $1.40 per million tokens combined, and Terra by 20% to $14 per million tokens combined, while introducing a premium Fast mode for its flagship Sol model at double the standard price. The moves come days after Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 at competitive pricing and Google launched lower-cost Gemini models, signaling a shift in AI competition toward cost and speed rather than capability alone. Luna now competes directly with the market's low-cost inference tier, though it remains more expensive than some alternatives like DeepSeek's flash model.

Lilian Weng, a researcher who cofounded AI startup Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is returning to OpenAI after announcing her departure from Thinking Machines earlier this week. The return marks a shift for Weng after her recent startup venture.

OpenAI released GPT-5.6, a model designed to improve efficiency across AI inference, model performance, and agentic workflows. The update focuses on delivering more useful intelligence per dollar spent. The announcement emphasizes efficiency gains rather than raw capability increases.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is approaching 1 billion weekly active users, according to internal company information, though the milestone arrives seven months later than the company originally targeted. Despite missing its initial timeline, ChatGPT remains among the fastest internet applications to reach this scale, having done so in less than four years since launch.