August 2026 brought meaningful price reductions from OpenAI, alongside a busy month of new model releases. OpenAI lowered GPT-5.6 Sol pricing across multiple usage tiers, while DeepSeek, Google, xAI and Z.ai added new models to the market. Three models were also retired, marking another round of model transitions across major providers.
In August 2026, we recorded 5 price changes, 7 new model releases and 3 model retirements.
Price changes
- 23rd Aug: Perplexity cut its price for Z.ai's GLM 5.2: Cached input $0.26 → $0.14 per 1M tokens (−46%).
- 23rd Aug: OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Sol: Input $5.00 → $4.00 per 1M tokens (−20%); Output $30.00 → $20.00 per 1M tokens (−33%), and 2 other price fields.
Batch, Priority and other tier price changes
- 23rd Aug: OpenAI cut the Batch price of GPT-5.6 Sol: Input $2.50 → $2.00 per 1M tokens (−20%); Output $15.00 → $10.00 per 1M tokens (−33%), and 2 other price fields.
- 23rd Aug: OpenAI cut the Flex price of GPT-5.6 Sol: Input $2.50 → $2.00 per 1M tokens (−20%); Output $15.00 → $10.00 per 1M tokens (−33%), and 2 other price fields.
- 23rd Aug: OpenAI cut the Priority price of GPT-5.6 Sol: Input $10.00 → $8.00 per 1M tokens (−20%); Output $60.00 → $40.00 per 1M tokens (−33%), and 2 other price fields.
New models
- 11th Aug: OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Cyber.
- 11th Aug: NVIDIA released Nemotron-3.5 Lightning-30b-a3b.
- 12th Aug: DeepSeek released Deepseek v4 Pro-0813.
- 12th Aug: xAI released Grok-4.6.
- 13th Aug: Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash.
- 14th Aug: Z.ai released GLM 5.3.
- 26th Aug: Z.ai released GLM 5.3 Flash.
Retired
- 5th Aug: Anthropic retired Claude Opus 4.1, with Claude Opus 4.8 as the suggested replacement.
- 10th Aug: OpenAI retired GPT-5.2 Chat Latest, with GPT-5.6 Sol as the suggested replacement.
- 10th Aug: OpenAI retired GPT-5.3 Chat Latest, with GPT-5.6 Sol as the suggested replacement.
Track every change, as it happens
This report captures the notable changes recorded during August 2026. AI model pricing, availability and lifecycle status continue to evolve throughout the year.
Follow the changes page for ongoing updates, or visit our methodology page to understand how we collect, verify and track model pricing.