OpenAI says it surpassed 1 billion users after slashing GPT-5.6 prices

OpenAI disclosed Friday that its models now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses, a milestone announced one day after the company slashed prices on two models in its GPT-5.6 family by as much as 80 percent.qz+1

The user figure, revealed in a blog post by CFO Sarah Friar titled "Building Abundant Intelligence," arrives amid an intensifying price war across the AI industry and just hours before Chinese rival DeepSeek launched the public beta of its V4 Flash model at a fraction of OpenAI's costs.openai+1

The Price Cuts

On Thursday, OpenAI reduced the price of GPT-5.6 Luna — its fastest and most lightweight model — by 80 percent, bringing API costs to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, down from $1 and $6. GPT-5.6 Terra, the mid-tier offering, dropped 20 percent to $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. Pricing for Sol, the most powerful model in the family, remains unchanged.cnbc+1

"We want to offer the best price/intelligence tradeoff at every level," CEO Sam Altman wrote on X.finance.yahoo

OpenAI attributed the reductions to efficiency gains: GPT-5.6 Sol helped optimize the production software used to serve models, reducing end-to-end serving costs by 20 percent and increasing token-generation efficiency by more than 15 percent through improvements to speculative decoding.qz+1

Competitive Pressure Mounts

The cuts came just three weeks after the GPT-5.6 series reached general availability — an unusually fast repricing that analysts tied to competitive dynamics rather than a planned product roadmap. Anthropic's mid-tier Claude Sonnet 4.6 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, now well above Terra's revised rates.turkiyetoday+1

Chinese open-weight models have added urgency. DeepSeek's V4 Flash, which entered public beta on Friday at roughly $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, undercuts even Luna's new pricing. Investor Michael Burry wrote on X that OpenAI's price cuts were "preparation for this," referring to DeepSeek's V4 launch.tradingview+2

The Wall Street Journal News Corp ↘ 3.58% reported that OpenAI spent weeks deliberating over reductions as leadership grew concerned about Anthropic making its Claude models cheaper.qz

Usage Growth and Financial Reality

OpenAI said users send roughly 50 percent more messages per day six months after signing up and use ChatGPT for about twice as many types of tasks. Agentic work through Codex now accounts for 99.8 percent of weekly output tokens across the company.openai

Yet the company remains deeply unprofitable. OpenAI reported revenue of $13.07 billion in 2025 against a net loss of $38.5 billion, and analysts project continued losses through at least 2030.aibusinessweekly+1

"For buyers, this represents a pivotal moment to extract more value from their AI partnerships," Arun Chandrasekaran, a vice president analyst at Gartner, told Business Insider. He added that the price competition "may serve as an early test of the business models of Frontier AI labs ahead of hotly anticipated public listings."finance.yahoo