RADAR R06 · RADAR

Frontier prices are falling fast

What SOTO observed

Anthropic says Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 on most work at 40% less than Opus 5 (Sep 22) and Sonnet 5.5 costs up to 30% less than Sonnet 5 (Sep 28). Decrypt reports GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on coding at about a fifth of the token price (Sep 29). Vercel's AI Gateway carried each new model the day it shipped.

Why it matters

Always-on agents consume tokens around the clock, so falling prices make them viable and shift value toward whoever routes and meters the traffic: gateways such as Vercel's, routers such as OpenRouter.

Would confirm

• A second lab cuts prices on its flagship within a month.
• Gateway or router volume disclosures accelerate.

Would invalidate

• Labs hold flagship prices while agent usage grows.

Desks. anthropic, openai, vercel, openrouter

Events behind it. EV-95A483, EV-3A65CF, EV-2123AA, EV-63AE1A, EV-F6B85B, EV-26A07D

History

• 2026-09-30: Detected: three price-performance steps from two labs in eight days.

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