OpenAI Releases GPT-6.1 Terra at $1 per Million Input Tokens, Half the Price of Its Predecessor

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on 26 October 2026, a model built for everyday computer-based work such as drafting proposals and filling in forms. The headline is the price. Standard API pricing is $1 per million input tokens, $0.05 per million cached input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, which OpenAI says is 50 percent lower than both GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol.

On OpenAI's own numbers the quality moved as well as the cost. At medium reasoning effort, Terra scores 15 percentage points higher than GPT-5.6 Terra on Agents' Last Exam at about a third of the cost. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 at maximum reasoning effort it solves 50.3 percent of tasks, against a published 21.5 percent for its predecessor. These are vendor-reported figures, so treat them as a starting point for your own testing rather than a verdict.

Availability is straightforward. Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users can use Terra in ChatGPT Work and in Codex, and developers can call it in the API as gpt-6.1-terra. It is not offered in the standard Chat experience. OpenAI's system card addendum also rates the model as Critical for cybersecurity capability and High for biological and chemical capability, which matters if you plan to give it access to real systems.

For a small studio like ours in Marlow, the interesting part is not the benchmark chart. It is that agentic computer use is getting cheap enough to leave running on dull, repetitive jobs such as renaming deliverables, filling asset sheets or checking a client portal. At these prices a failed run costs pennies, which changes how freely you can experiment.

The sensible way to adopt it is to pick one tedious task, run it through Terra on a handful of real examples, and measure the error rate against a person doing the same job. Price cuts only help if the output is something you would put your name to.

We will be testing it against a few of our own file-handling chores over the coming weeks. If it holds up, it moves from an interesting demo to a line item in the way we work.