After announcing it was reducing the prices of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, tech giant OpenAI reached the milestone of one billion registered users on its platform. This is equivalent to almost the entire population of China (1.4 billion) and nearly five times that of Brazil (213 million).
Earlier this week, the company stated that it was reducing the price of the ChatGPT -5.6 Luna by 80%, and the price of the GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%. However, the price of the flagship model, the Sol, remains unchanged.
"When the cost of useful intelligence falls, more work becomes viable," OpenAI tells the Wall Street Journal .
“As adoption grows, we gain revenue, real-world feedback, and visibility into demand to continue investing in the next generation of research and infrastructure,” says the company led by Sam Altman .
What the company plans, in a more accelerated way, is to attract more users, seeking to keep up with the rapid growth of competitors, including Anthropic .
OpenAI's ChatGPT is no longer the undisputed leader in the AI race, as Anthropic's products are now more highly valued in the market.
Attracting users has become more difficult in recent months, as corporate clients have started to shy away due to the high costs of using AI.
Under the new pricing policy, companies using OpenAI technology will pay less for each million "tokens"—the units used to measure AI usage—that are run on their models.
Sending text messages to Luna dropped from $1 to $0.20 per million tokens, and to Terra from $2.50 to $2, while generating replies decreased from $6 and $15 to $1.20 and $12, respectively.
Anthropic's mid-tier Claude Sonnet 4.6 model, in turn, costs $3 per million tokens for entry and $15 per million tokens for exit, higher than the fees of its competitor's Terra model.
OpenAI stated that the lower prices were partly made possible by efficiency gains in GPT-5.6, including the model's ability to enhance code and optimize performance during internal development.
The cost-cutting package comes less than a month after OpenAI stated it was considering granting the U.S. government a 5% equity stake, and that competitors should follow suit.
This also comes at a time when the company is moving towards a $250 billion deal with Nvidia to secure the construction of a mega data center in Ohio, in the United States.
The funds helped ChatGPT's owner finance a 10-gigawatt (GW) project, which is already being developed in partnership with Softbank. It would be the largest data center project announced so far.
Last month, OpenAI raised its projection for spending on computing power to around $750 billion by 2030, up from the $600 billion projection made earlier in the year.
