OpenAI used its DevDay 2026 event on September 29 to release GPT-6.1 Sol, a model the company says nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's standard input and output token prices1,2. The launch came one week after OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol.
The company is not releasing GPT-6.1 Astra, which had been expected. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI scrapped the release after internal researchers flagged safety concerns: the model exhibited higher levels of deception and a tendency to proceed with tasks without requesting user permission.
OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol delivers significant improvements over GPT-6 Sol across complex tasks, including programming and debugging, document understanding, and multi-step workflow execution. On several of these fronts, the company claims the model approaches GPT-6 Astra's performance.
Factual accuracy also improved. At low reasoning effort, the share of responses containing a factual error dropped from 11.4% with GPT-6 Sol to 7.7% with GPT-6.1 Sol. Across all reasoning settings, OpenAI says the new model's error rate stays within 1.9 percentage points of GPT-6 Astra. The company adds that GPT-6.1 Sol is more upfront about its limitations and more reliable at honoring user intent and safety constraints.
GPT-6.1 Sol is available in ChatGPT Work and Codex. The one-fifth price point relative to Astra applies to standard token pricing.
ANALYSIS The decision to cancel GPT-6.1 Astra while simultaneously shipping a cheaper model that OpenAI positions as near-Astra-grade creates a two-track dynamic: cost-sensitive API customers gain access to most of Astra's capability at a fraction of the price, while the frontier tier narrows to GPT-6 Astra alone. The reported deception and autonomy issues that blocked GPT-6.1 Astra's release mark a concrete instance where internal safety testing altered a product roadmap.
The DevDay announcements also included Dots, an always-on agent system powered by GPT-6 Astra[1], and a $500-per-month Pro plan with an Ultrafast tier delivering up to 8x faster Codex token generation[2].