OpenAI Introduces GPT-6.1 Terra With Lower Costs and Stronger Benchmarks

OpenAI introduced GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast and efficient model that combines detailed visual reasoning, precise computer use and clearer, more natural writing. The company says it is a significant step up from GPT-5.6 Terra for the communication and computer-based tasks that fill the workday. It is available starting today to Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and developers can access it through the OpenAI API as gpt-6.1-terra.

Visual reasoning and computer use

On Agents' Last Exam, a benchmark of professional tasks, GPT-6.1 Terra scores 15 percentage points higher than GPT-5.6 Terra at medium reasoning effort and at about one-third the cost. It performs on par with GPT-6 Astra at only one-tenth its price per token. At maximum effort, it is over three times as token efficient as Claude Opus 5.5 and one-fourth its price per token, resulting in about a 9x lower cost per task. Terra also completes tasks over three times faster than both GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol. On MMMU-Pro, a visual reasoning benchmark, it outperforms GPT-5.6 Terra at every reasoning setting and nearly matches GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol at much lower cost. On OSWorld 2.1, which tests how AI agents use desktop apps for multistep tasks, it surpasses GPT-5.6 Terra's best score at medium reasoning effort at a fraction of the cost per task.

Factuality and coding

On an internal benchmark of error-inducing prompts, the error rate at low reasoning effort fell from 53.6% with GPT-5.6 Terra to 16.7% with GPT-6.1 Terra, a drop of nearly 37 percentage points. At maximum effort, the error rate fell by 18 percentage points to 4.3%, nearly matching the rates for GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, GPT-6.1 Terra solves 50.3% of tasks at maximum reasoning effort, more than double GPT-5.6 Terra's published score of 21.5%. On Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, it surpasses GPT-6.1 Sol at lower cost at max reasoning and comes within five points of Opus 5.5 at less than one-fifth the estimated cost. For the most complex coding tasks, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra remain the better choice.

Safety and alignment

GPT-6.1 Terra meets the Critical threshold in cybersecurity under the Preparedness Framework and maintains the protections developed for GPT-6 Astra. It brings the alignment improvements of the GPT-6 series, and evaluations found it is more likely to stay within scope and honestly disclose limitations and potential blockers to the user compared with GPT-5.6 Terra. In prompt-injection tests, it also showed strong resistance to malicious instructions designed to divert it from the user's task. More detail is available in the system card.

Pricing and availability

Standard API pricing is $1 per million input tokens, $0.05 per million cached input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. Those prices are 50% lower than those of GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol. The company says the same usage allowance in ChatGPT Work and Codex covers more tasks than with GPT-5.6 Terra and substantially more than with GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Astra. High-volume uses such as reading incoming invoices and entering their details into accounting software are among the tasks it targets.

Sources: OpenAI