GPT-5.6 Sol Leads With Price, Not Capability

OpenAI released GPT-5.6 'Sol' on Saturday, and the launch claim was about cost rather than capability: Sam Altman says the model runs at half the price and roughly twice the token efficiency of Anthropic's Fable 5 on the same tasks, compounding to a claimed four-to-one cost advantage. The claim is currently supported by OpenAI's own posts plus a single independent developer's head-to-head testing that circulated on Hacker News — no systematic price-per-task comparison exists yet. We work through what's confirmed versus what isn't, why a flagship launch leading with pricing is a different kind of statement than the usual capability pitch, and whether the discount reflects genuine engineering efficiency or a subsidized bid for market share. Anthropic extended free access to Fable 5 days afte ...