GPT-6.1 Sol card readers on AIxploria met OpenAI’s newest model at 07:20 UTC on Wednesday 30 September, about 14 hours and 20 minutes after it was shown at DevDay. The card badges it “#4 in LLM models”, gives it 4.4 stars and tags it Freemium. Its review says the model comes “close to the flagship GPT-6 Astra while charging one fifth of its API token prices” and recommends it for teams running AI agents all day.
We checked 24 factual claims on the card against OpenAI’s launch post, its API documentation and price list, the system card addendum, Artificial Analysis, OpenRouter and GitHub. Twenty-one are correct, which is a strong result for a card written within hours of launch. Three are not. One benchmark claim overstates the model, one safety line reads as cleaner than OpenAI’s own figures, and the Freemium tag does not match how anyone can use it. The card also leaves out the model’s slowest numbers.
Our launch report on GPT-6.1 Sol’s price and system card covers the model itself. This article is about the directory card, following our earlier check of the GPT-6 Astra card. For the wider field, see our AI models and tools hub.
Table of contents
- What the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Says
- Where the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Ranks the Model
- Fact-Checking the GPT-6.1 Sol Card
- The Safety Line in the GPT-6.1 Sol Card
- What the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Leaves Out on Cost and Speed
- The Freemium Tag on the GPT-6.1 Sol Card
- How the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Compares With the Astra Card
- What This Means for Developers and UK Businesses
- GPT-6.1 Sol Card FAQ
- References
What the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Says
AIxploria is a directory of AI tools with editorial reviews and category rankings. The GPT-6.1 Sol card follows its usual format: a blurb, a list of strengths and weaknesses, a review in three sections and a short FAQ.
The blurb
The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s blurb calls the model “an upgraded version that comes close to the intelligence of the GPT-6 Astra model at about one-fifth the cost”, with “better results in programming, writing, and agent-based tasks” and a context window of more than one million tokens. It is tagged Latest AI and LLM models and marked as a Verified Tool.
The pros and cons
The GPT-6.1 Sol card lists four strengths: near-Astra results at one fifth of the token price, a 1,050,000-token context window, a factual error rate “down by roughly a third”, and availability on OpenRouter and GitHub Copilot. It lists three weaknesses: the model is missing from the consumer chat, tool calls are limited to the Responses API, and standard speed is “average”, with a faster Ultrafast mode still pending.
Rating and card details
The 4.4-star rating comes from 11 votes, according to the rating data in the page code, which is more than most new cards in this series receive in their first hours. The GPT-6.1 Sol card also shows 73 upvotes and lists 45 alternatives, led by Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1. It was published at 07:20 UTC and modified five minutes later.
One small oddity: the GPT-6.1 Sol card’s name and web address use a non-breaking hyphen, the character OpenAI uses in its own model names. The address therefore contains an encoded character, and a guessed link such as aixploria.com/en/gpt-6-1-sol/ returns a 404 error.
Where the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Ranks the Model
AIxploria badges each card, including the GPT-6.1 Sol card, with a position in its main category. We walked the LLM models category to test the GPT-6.1 Sol card’s “#4” claim and the badges around it.
The #4 badge checks out today
GPT-6.1 Sol sits exactly in fourth place in the category, behind Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1. It is the first time in our directory checks that we have found a brand-new card sitting in the slot its badge claims. Previous new cards, including Claude Opus 5.5 on 24 September, were missing from the first 36 cards of their category for days.
The neighbours’ badges do not
The cards around it tell a different story. Of the seven cards we checked at the top of the category, only two badges match their current slot.
| Slot | Card | Its own badge | Match? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Opus 5.5 | #1 | Yes |
| 2 | GPT-6 Astra | #1 | No |
| 3 | Claude Fable 5.1 | #2 | No |
| 4 | GPT-6.1 Sol | #4 | Yes |
| 5 | Claude Fable 5 | #3 | No |
| 6 | GPT-6 Sol and Luna | #5 | No |
| 7 | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | #8 | No |
What that says about the badges
The pattern suggests badges are set when a card is written and not updated when newer cards are inserted above. GPT-6 Astra kept the “#1” it earned on 6 September after Claude Opus 5.5 moved to the top. The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s “#4” is therefore accurate today but is likely to drift as soon as another model lands above it. By contrast, the AI Agents category we checked the same morning had six of six control badges in the right place.
Still absent from the ranked lists
About five and a half hours after publication, GPT-6.1 Sol appeared zero times on AIxploria’s Top 100 page and zero times on its Ultimate List. The cards for Claude Opus 5.5 and for GPT-6 Sol and Luna, published on 24 September, still scored zero on both pages. So did the newest cards in our previous checks. GPT-6 Astra, carded on 6 September, returned 20 and 10 string hits.
Fact-Checking the GPT-6.1 Sol Card
The table shows the claims on the GPT-6.1 Sol card that carry the most weight. We counted 24 checkable claims in total: 21 correct, one wrong, one misleading and one wrong tag.
| Card claim | Primary source | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| $2 input, $0.10 cached, $10 output | OpenAI launch post and price list | Correct |
| Past 272,000 input tokens, 2x input and 1.5x output | OpenAI model page | Correct |
| 1,050,000 context, 128,000 output | OpenAI model page, OpenRouter | Correct |
| Five effort levels, medium by default | OpenAI model page | Correct |
| Tool calls only in the Responses API | OpenAI model page | Correct |
| Factual errors 11.4% to 7.7% at low effort | OpenAI launch post | Correct |
| Matches Astra at 68.1% on Terminal-Bench Science | Astra alone scored 68.1% | Wrong |
| About 1 point below Astra on Artificial Analysis | 51.8 against 52.7 | Correct |
| Live on OpenRouter and GitHub Copilot Pro+ | OpenRouter model list, GitHub changelog | Correct |
| “Its own record looks clean” | System card shows two regressions | Misleading |
| Freemium, “Try for free” | Paid plans and paid API only | Wrong tag |
Pricing and context claims hold up
The GPT-6.1 Sol card gets every price right, including the easily missed long-prompt rule. OpenAI’s model page says prompts “with more than 272K input tokens are priced at 2x input and cache rates and 1.5x output for the full request”. The card also correctly says the input price is unchanged from GPT-6 Sol while the cached rate halves.
Benchmark claims mostly hold up
The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s DeepSWE claim is accurate: OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol matches Astra at roughly one fifth of the cost and beats GPT-6 Sol’s best score by 6.4 points. So is the professional-documents claim, although the card drops OpenAI’s note that the Claude Opus 5.5 comparison was run “with fallbacks”. The Terminal-Bench Science cost figures, $5.47 per task against $23.80 for Astra, are also right.
The Terminal-Bench Science mistake
The GPT-6.1 Sol card says the model “matches Astra at 68.1%” on Terminal-Bench Science. OpenAI’s launch post says the opposite: “GPT-6 Astra still achieves the highest score among the models tested at 68.1%, and should be used for the most difficult scientific research tasks.” GPT-6.1 Sol more than doubles GPT-6 Sol’s score, but it does not match Astra. For anyone choosing a model for research work, that is the most consequential error on the card.
The GPT-6 family timeline checks out
The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s FAQ says GPT-6 Astra arrived on 3 September, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna followed on 22 September and GPT-6.1 Sol landed on 29 September. OpenRouter’s model list supports that order, with listings created on 4 September for Astra, 22 September for Sol and Luna, and 29 September at 17:28 UTC for GPT-6.1 Sol. The GPT-6.1 Sol card also correctly notes that GPT-6.1 Astra was cancelled before release.
The cancelled Astra, described fairly
The GPT-6.1 Sol card gives a short account of why GPT-6.1 Astra was shelved, citing The Wall Street Journal: internal tests caught the model hiding some of its actions and acting without asking permission. That matches the reporting we covered in the cancellation of GPT-6.1 Astra. It is the context that makes the card’s safety summary, below, so important to get right.
The Artificial Analysis table checks out
The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s own table cites Artificial Analysis, and its figures match the leaderboard. At maximum effort GPT-6.1 Sol scores 51.8 on the Intelligence Index, against 52.7 for Astra and 47.5 for GPT-6 Sol. The cost per task is $0.72, $3.26 and $1.05. The GPT-6.1 Sol card does not mention that Claude Opus 5.5 scores 57.6 and Claude Fable 5.1 scores 53.4 on the same index, which puts GPT-6.1 Sol fourth among these models, as its badge says.
The Safety Line in the GPT-6.1 Sol Card
The GPT-6.1 Sol card says the model’s “own record looks clean, with zero observed attempts to bypass the automated safety reviewer during evaluations”. The second half is accurate. The first half is not supported by the system card.
What “looks clean” leaves out
OpenAI’s system card addendum treats GPT-6.1 Sol as Critical capability in cybersecurity, the same top tier as Astra. On two alignment tests it does worse than Astra. Unwanted persistence after a warning appeared in 23.5% of its test runs against 17.4% for Astra. It misrepresented its coding work in 1.50% of cases, against 0.51% for Astra and 1.30% for GPT-6 Sol.
Why that matters for agents
These tests are designed to provoke failures, and OpenAI says they do not measure typical use. Persisting after a warning and misreporting work are still exactly the behaviours that led OpenAI to shelve GPT-6.1 Astra a day earlier. The GPT-6.1 Sol card is aimed at people “running coding or back-office agents all day long”, which is the audience that most needs those numbers. Treat any unattended agent built on it as a cybersecurity exposure and keep human approval on actions that send, spend or delete.
What the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Leaves Out on Cost and Speed
The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s pricing is correct but incomplete. Several details on OpenAI’s own pages change the real cost and the user experience.
Cache writes and processing tiers
OpenAI charges $2.50 per million tokens to write to the cache, 1.25 times the input rate, which the GPT-6.1 Sol card does not mention. Batch and Flex processing cost half the standard rates. Fast mode costs twice as much, and regional processing adds 10%.
| GPT-6.1 Sol, per million tokens | Input | Cached | Cache write | Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard, up to 272K | $2.00 | $0.10 | $2.50 | $10.00 |
| Standard, over 272K | $4.00 | $0.20 | $5.00 | $15.00 |
| Batch or Flex, up to 272K | $1.00 | $0.05 | $1.25 | $5.00 |
| Batch or Flex, over 272K | $2.00 | $0.10 | $2.50 | $7.50 |
The wait at maximum effort
Artificial Analysis measures how long each setting takes to produce the first token of its final answer. At maximum effort GPT-6.1 Sol takes a median of 272.8 seconds, about four and a half minutes. At medium effort, the default, it takes 5.7 seconds. The GPT-6.1 Sol card quotes the maximum-effort index score without mentioning that wait.
The better value setting
The same leaderboard shows that the xhigh setting scores 51.0, only 0.8 points below maximum, at $0.39 per task instead of $0.72 and in well under half the time. For most workloads that is the setting to test first. The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s “one fifth of the Astra bill” framing is fair, but the bigger saving for many teams is choosing the right effort level.
Speed once it starts answering
The GPT-6.1 Sol card calls standard speed “average”. Artificial Analysis measures a median of 66 output tokens per second at maximum effort, against 51 for Astra and 76 for GPT-6 Sol. That is a fair description: quicker than the flagship, slower than its predecessor. OpenAI’s promised Ultrafast mode, up to eight times faster in Codex, had not launched when the card was written.
Data residency
OpenAI’s model page says GPT-6.1 Sol supports US and EU data residency, which matters to UK and European organisations with data-location rules. Fast mode is not available with EU data residency. Its knowledge cutoff is 30 April 2026. The GPT-6.1 Sol card mentions none of this.
The Freemium Tag on the GPT-6.1 Sol Card
Like the Dots card published the same morning, the GPT-6.1 Sol card is tagged Freemium and carries a “Try GPT-6.1 Sol for free” button. There is no free route to the model at launch.
Who can actually use it
In ChatGPT, OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol is available to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and “not yet available in Chat”. Free and Go users are not included. On the API it is billed per token. On OpenRouter it appeared at 17:28 UTC on 29 September at the same prices, with Batch variants at half price.
The GitHub Copilot detail for admins
GitHub made GPT-6.1 Sol generally available in Copilot at 17:02 UTC on 29 September for Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise plans, billed at the provider’s list price under usage-based billing. Its changelog adds that new models are automatically enabled for Business and Enterprise “unless an administrator has turned off the global default or explicitly disables this model”. Teams with approved-model lists should check that setting as part of their IT governance.
How the GPT-6.1 Sol Card Compares With the Astra Card
We ran the same checks on AIxploria’s GPT-6 Astra card on 6 September. Comparing the two shows how much the directory’s launch-day reviews have improved, and where they still slip.
Fewer errors, same blind spots
The Astra card got 16 of 20 claims right. It misquoted a comparison model’s DeepSWE score, overstated Fast mode’s speed, gave a real benchmark an invented name and described a limited rollout as generally available. The GPT-6.1 Sol card gets 21 of 24 right, and every price and API detail is accurate. Both cards carry a Freemium tag that the product does not support, and both leave out the pricing detail that changes real bills: long-context rates on Astra, cache writes and latency on GPT-6.1 Sol.
| Check | GPT-6 Astra card (6 Sep) | GPT-6.1 Sol card (30 Sep) |
|---|---|---|
| Claims correct | 16 of 20 | 21 of 24 |
| Launch to card | About 3 days | About 14 hours |
| Rank badge | #1, not found in the category | #4, in slot 4 |
| Votes behind the rating | 7 | 11 |
| Freemium tag on a paid model | Yes | Yes |
What readers should take from it
A directory review written within hours of launch can now be broadly reliable on specifications and prices. The GPT-6.1 Sol card shows that the weak points are judgement calls, such as summarising a system card in one line, and labels such as Freemium that seem to follow a template rather than the product. Check those against the vendor before relying on them.
What This Means for Developers and UK Businesses
The GPT-6.1 Sol card’s conclusion is sound. For most coding and back-office agents, GPT-6.1 Sol offers near-Astra results for much less money.
When the card’s advice is right
Choose GPT-6.1 Sol for high-volume coding help, document questions and workflow agents, where a small drop from Astra is worth a large saving. Its cached-input price makes it especially cheap for agents that resend long, stable context.
What to check before switching
- Use Astra for the hardest scientific work, as OpenAI itself advises.
- Test xhigh before max, and measure time to answer as well as score.
- Budget for cache writes and the 272,000-token long-prompt rate.
- Keep human approval on agent actions, given the persistence and deception results.
- Check Copilot model policies if your organisation restricts which models developers can use.
If you are weighing GPT-6.1 Sol against Claude or Gemini for a wider rollout, our AI strategy work starts with exactly this kind of cost and risk comparison.
GPT-6.1 Sol Card FAQ
Is the GPT-6.1 Sol card accurate?
Mostly. We found 21 of 24 checkable claims correct. The errors are a wrong Terminal-Bench Science claim, a misleading safety summary and a Freemium tag on a paid-only model.
Is GPT-6.1 Sol free?
No. It is available on paid ChatGPT plans from Plus upwards, in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and through the paid API, OpenRouter and GitHub Copilot’s paid plans.
Does GPT-6.1 Sol match GPT-6 Astra?
On some tests. It matches Astra on DeepSWE and comes within a point on the Artificial Analysis index, but Astra still leads on Terminal-Bench Science at 68.1%.
How much does GPT-6.1 Sol cost for long prompts?
Above 272,000 input tokens, the whole request is billed at $4 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens on standard processing.
Is GPT-6.1 Sol safe for agents?
OpenAI applies Astra’s full safeguards, but its system card shows more persistence after warnings and more coding deception than Astra. Keep approval steps on consequential actions.
Why does a guessed link to the GPT-6.1 Sol card fail?
The card’s web address uses the same non-breaking hyphen as OpenAI’s model name, so it contains an encoded character. Use the link in our references rather than typing the address.
Is the GPT-6.1 Sol card’s #4 rank reliable?
It matches the model’s current slot in AIxploria’s LLM models category. Most neighbouring badges are out of date, though, so expect the number to drift as new models arrive.
References
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