AI Model Pricing Guide

Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash (Aug 13) doesn't chase peak intelligence — it chases value. Intro price $0.75/$3.75 per 1M (half 3.6 Flash's original cost) through Dec 31, then $1.50/$7.50. DeepSWE v1.1: 65.3% (vs 49% on 3.6). FrontierCode 1.1: 43.6% (vs 34.4%). WebDev Arena 1588 Elo (vs 1538). GDP.pdf 34% (vs 22%). AutomationBench 30.4% (vs 17%). Three weeks after 3.6 Flash — the fastest Flash cadence yet. Now powers Gemini Spark.

xAI's Grok 4.6 (Aug 12) launched with Cursor at $2/$6 per 1M, $0.50 cached input, with a 1753 ELO claim that overtakes Kimi K3. Live on xAI API, Grok Build, Cursor, and Grok Bot, plus partners OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. A fast variant costs twice the price. xAI frames it as roughly half the cost of other frontier models. 2x included usage in Cursor and Grok Build for the first week.

Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI) released GLM-5.3 on Aug 14 — a 743-billion-parameter model built by scaling post-training on the GLM-5.2 base. Z.ai calls it the most capable open-weights model for coding. Live via GLM Coding Plan and ZCode; API and downloadable weights follow after a safety review (~2 weeks). GLM-5.2's API was ~$1.40/$4.40 — roughly a tenth of US frontier per-token rates. 'Dramatic improvement over GLM-5.2 with fewer output tokens.'

DeepSeek's V4-Pro went generally available Aug 13 after 4 months in preview. DeepSWE 62.7% (up from 12.8% in preview), Terminal-Bench 2.1: 87.9, AA Intelligence Index (reasoning): 53. DeepSeek also overhauled its API billing — replacing flat rates with peak and off-peak pricing effective Aug 16. Off-peak: $0.66/$1.98 per 1M. Peak: $1.32/$3.96. Still below Western alternatives (Anthropic's Fable 5 charges $50/M output). 17 of 24 hours stay at half price.

Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max went GA on Aug 3 at $2/$6 per 1M tokens — flat across the entire 1M-token context window with no long-prompt surcharge. 2.4T-param MoE (95B active), multimodal. AA Intelligence Index v4.1.1: 58 pts — #8 globally, right between GPT-5.6 Sol (high) and GPT-5.6 Terra (max). Cached input at $0.25/1M. Open weights promised within days. Undercuts Kimi K3 ($3/$15) and GPT-5.6 Terra ($2/$12) on output.

MiniMax M2 (Aug 3) is an agent-and-code model at $0.30/$1.20 per 1M — 8% of Claude Sonnet's price at ~2x the inference speed (~100 TPS). Top 5 globally on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Full open weights on HuggingFace. Built for Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Kilo Code, and Droid. Free API trial until Nov 7; MiniMax Agent product also free for a limited time.

Tencent Hy3 (formerly Hunyuan) went globally available Aug 5. 295B MoE (21B active), 256K context. Apache-licensed weights on HuggingFace. OpenRouter from $0.13/$0.53 per 1M — among the cheapest open APIs on the market. Topped OpenRouter usage within a week of its Jul 6 launch. Free via WorkBuddy until Aug 31.

OpenAI slashed GPT-5.6 prices on Jul 30 — just three weeks after launch. Luna dropped 80% to $0.20/$1.20 (from $1/$6), making it the cheapest frontier model. Terra fell 20% to $2/$12. Sol held at $5/$30 but gained a Fast mode at $10/$60 (2.5x speed). OpenAI credits GPU efficiency gains for ~20% of the savings. The cuts answer pressure from Anthropic's Opus 5 and Moonshot's Kimi K3.

Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash (Jul 21) doesn't chase peak intelligence — it chases efficiency. 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash on the AA Index, up to 65% fewer on DeepSWE. Better coding, knowledge work, and computer use (OSWorld 83%) at a lower price ($1.50/$7.50 vs 3.5 Flash's $1.50/$9.00). Also launched: 3.5 Flash-Lite at $0.30/$2.50 running at 350 tokens/s — the fastest 3.5-series model.

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on Jul 24, 2026 — $5/$25 per 1M (same as Opus 4.8, half of Fable 5's $10/$50). It tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61 points, ahead of Fable 5 (60) and GPT-5.6 Sol (59). ARC-AGI-3: 30.2% — 4x GPT-5.6 Sol, 20x Opus 4.8. New default on Claude Max. Fast mode runs 2.5x faster at $10/$50 (API research preview). Batch API at $2.50/$12.50. Opus 5 is Anthropic's fourth model launch in under two months.

Google DeepMind launched Gemini 3.5 Pro on Jul 17 with a 2-million-token context window — double anything at the frontier. New Deep Think reasoning mode (gated to $250/mo Ultra). Rebuilt from scratch on a new pretraining run after the original failed on recursive tool-calling. $1.25/$10 — 4x cheaper input than GPT-5.6 Sol.

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model — the largest ever released. $3/$15 per 1M, 1M context, native multimodal. A deliberate shift away from ultra-low-price strategy toward enterprise performance competition. Full weights public Jul 27. Shook US chip stocks on release.

GPT-5.6 launched July 9 in three tiers — Sol ($5/$30), Terra ($2.50/$15), Luna ($1/$6). Sol beats Fable 5 on Agents' Last Exam by 13 points at ~1/4 the cost. Luna outperforms Opus 4.8 at ~1/16 the cost. First frontier launch with US government coordination.

Grok 4.5 solves SWE Bench Pro tasks with 15,954 output tokens on average — 4.2x fewer than Opus 4.8 (67,020). At $2/$6 and 80 TPS, it delivers Opus-class results at a fraction of the cost.

Muse Spark 1.1 is Meta's first ever paid API model — $1.25/$4.25, ~25% cheaper than OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta Superintelligence Labs, run by former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang, built it for agentic tasks and tool use. $20 free credits for new accounts.

August 2026 continues the AI price war, and it's accelerating. Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75/$3.75 intro (Aug 13) brings DeepSWE 65.3% to cents per million. Grok 4.6 at $2/$6 (Aug 12) claims 1753 ELO. GLM-5.3 (Aug 14) — 743B open-weight coder at ~a tenth of US frontier rates. DeepSeek V4-Pro GA (Aug 13) at $0.66/$1.98 off-peak. Tencent Hy3 at $0.13/$0.53, MiniMax M2 at $0.30/$1.20, Qwen 3.8-Max at $2/$6 flat across 1M context, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.20/$1.20 (cheapest frontier), Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25 with near-Fable-5 intelligence, Gemini 3.5 Pro at $1.25/$10 with 2M context, Muse Spark at $1.25/$4.25 — frontier compute is commodifying. The top three on the AA Intelligence Index (Opus 5 max 63, Fable 5 62, GPT-5.6 Sol max 61) are separated by 2 points. Qwen 3.8-Max (58) and Kimi K3 (60) prove the open-weight frontier is closing the gap.