Is the price of AI falling?

Not at the frontier: OpenAI's flagship rose from $30 (2023) to $50, and Anthropic's eased from $75 (2024) to $50. Below the frontier, yes: strong mid-tier models list at $10, though Gemini's goes to $20 on Dec 1, 2026. A two-tier market, not a collapse.

Are these the prices companies actually pay?

These are list prices. Enterprise discounts, caching and batch APIs reduce real costs; those prices are not public.

BRAIAIN Compute Last updated: 2026-10-20

What do LLM tokens cost?

Name: LLM API list prices, 2023–2026
Creator: BRAIAIN
Published: 2026-10-20
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

As of October 2026, flagship list prices are $50 per million output tokens (OpenAI GPT-6 Astra; Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1), with the strong mid-tier at $10 (GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon). Flagship prices have not collapsed — OpenAI's rose from GPT-4 Turbo's $30 in 2023 to $50, while Anthropic's eased from Claude 3 Opus's $75 to $50 — but the strong mid tier fell to $10 (Gemini's rises to $20 on Dec 1, 2026): a two-tier market.

The data

date	provider	model	input usd per 1m	output usd per 1m	provenance
2023-11-06	OpenAI	GPT-4 Turbo	10	30	verified
2024-03-04	Anthropic	Claude 3 Opus	15	75	verified
2025-04-04	Google	Gemini 2.5 Pro (<=200k)	1.25	10	press (weaker)
2026-10-20	OpenAI	GPT-6 Astra	10	50	list price, page undated
2026-10-20	OpenAI	GPT-6.1 Sol	2	10	list price, page undated
2026-10-20	Anthropic	Claude Fable 5.1	10	50	list price, page undated
2026-10-20	Anthropic	Claude Opus 5.5	4	20	list price, page undated
2026-10-20	Anthropic	Claude Sonnet 5.5	2	10	list price, page undated
2026-10-20	Google	Gemini 4 Argon	2	10	list price, page undated; $4/$20 from 2026-12-01

Download: CSV · JSON — compiled data CC BY 4.0; underlying sources keep their own terms.

Method & caveats

Providers' own published list prices per million tokens, with historical points from dated announcements. List prices ignore volume discounts, caching and batch pricing, and models across generations are not like-for-like in capability — the comparison describes the shape of the market (a persistent frontier premium above a cheapening mid-tier), not price per unit of intelligence. Pricing pages are undated; fetch dates recorded.

Sources

Questions

Is the price of AI falling?: Not at the frontier: OpenAI's flagship rose from $30 (2023) to $50, and Anthropic's eased from $75 (2024) to $50. Below the frontier, yes: strong mid-tier models list at $10, though Gemini's goes to $20 on Dec 1, 2026. A two-tier market, not a collapse.
Are these the prices companies actually pay?: These are list prices. Enterprise discounts, caching and batch APIs reduce real costs; those prices are not public.

Cite this

BRAIAIN. "What do LLM tokens cost?" www.braiain.com/token-prices.html, updated 2026-10-20. Original sources as listed above.

Part of BRAIAIN — the AI buildout, measured. Every figure carries its source and date; the full rules are in the methodology. Corrections: see the contact note there. © 2026 BRAIAIN, a dnilgis project.