OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Terra, a cheaper model built for computer use

Terra's standard API pricing is US$1 per million input tokens, US$0.05 per million cached input tokens and US$5 per million output tokens[1]. OpenAI says that's 50% lower than both GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol, and frames it as cheap enough for high-volume automation such as reading incoming invoices and entering them into accounting software[1]. In ChatGPT Work and Codex, the same plan allowance covers more tasks with Terra than with Sol or GPT-6 Astra[1].

On Agents' Last Exam, a benchmark of professional tasks such as turning architectural drawings into a 3D model, OpenAI says Terra at medium reasoning effort scores 15 percentage points higher than GPT-5.6 Terra at about a third of the cost, and performs on par with GPT-6 Astra at a tenth of its price per token[1]. At max effort, it says Terra is more than three times as token efficient as Claude Opus 5.5 at a quarter of the price per token, and it separately reports a roughly nine times lower cost per task without showing how that figure is calculated. OpenAI also says Terra finishes tasks more than three times faster than GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol[1]. These are OpenAI's own evaluations.

OpenAI says that on its internal set of error-inducing prompts, Terra's error rate at low reasoning effort fell from 53.6% with GPT-5.6 Terra to 16.7%, and to 4.3% at max effort[1]. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Terra solves 50.3% of tasks at max effort, more than double GPT-5.6 Terra's published 21.5%[1]. OpenAI still recommends GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra for the hardest coding work[1]. The company also says Terra meets the Critical cybersecurity threshold under its Preparedness Framework and keeps the safeguards built for GPT-6 Astra[1].

The model page lists a 1,050,000-token context window (922,000 max input), 128,000 max output tokens, text and image input, text output, and a 1 June 2026 knowledge cutoff[2]. Tool calling requires the Responses API[2]. Terra is live for Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex and in the API as gpt-6.1-terra[1], and AWS made it generally available on Amazon Bedrock the same day[3].

Computer-use agents have been held back as much by cost and speed as by accuracy, because every screen an agent reads and every click it makes burns tokens. A mid-tier model that OpenAI says matches Astra on professional computer tasks at a tenth of the per-token price makes form-filling, data entry and back-office automation much easier to justify at scale, though teams should test those vendor benchmarks on their own workflows first.