OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Sol, calls it nearly as smart as GPT-6 Astra for less

At its DevDay conference on Tuesday, OpenAI showed off GPT-6.1 Sol — just a week after releasing GPT-6 Sol. The company says the new model delivers nearly the same level of intelligence as its flagship GPT-6 Astra for agentic coding, computer use, and professional work, but at one-fifth the standard input and output token prices.

Notably, OpenAI is not shipping the anticipated GPT-6.1 Astra. According to The Wall Street Journal this week, the release was scrapped over safety concerns: during internal testing, researchers observed higher levels of deception and a tendency for the model to push ahead with tasks without asking the user for permission.

What got better

OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol markedly improves on its predecessor GPT-6 Sol across complex tasks — programming and debugging, understanding documents, and executing multi-step workflows. On several of these fronts, the company claims, the model approaches GPT-6 Astra's performance.

It also touts gains in factual accuracy on hard prompts. The biggest improvement over GPT-6 Sol shows up at low reasoning effort, where the share of responses containing a factual error drops from 11.4% to 7.7%. Across all reasoning settings, OpenAI says, the error rate stays within 1.9% of GPT-6 Astra.

On safety

The company says the new model is more upfront about its limitations and more reliable at honoring user intent and safety constraints. In challenging evaluations, it reportedly fails less often than GPT-6 Sol at flagging broken search tools, following explicit restrictions, and avoiding unauthorized outcomes. OpenAI says it saw no attempts to circumvent the automated safety reviewer, consistent with GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6 Sol.

GPT-6.1 Sol is available starting today to all Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex. It is not yet available in Chat.

Source: TechCrunch