
LLM API Pricing Comparison - July 2026
Verified July 13: GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna hit GA at $5/$30, $2.50/$15 and $1/$6, Grok 4.5 lands at $2/$6, Grok 4.1 Fast quietly redirects to pricier Grok 4.3, DeepSeek's peak-hour doubling goes live July 15.
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Verified July 13: GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna hit GA at $5/$30, $2.50/$15 and $1/$6, Grok 4.5 lands at $2/$6, Grok 4.1 Fast quietly redirects to pricier Grok 4.3, DeepSeek's peak-hour doubling goes live July 15.

DeepSeek is developing its own inference chip, confirmed by Reuters sources - the first semiconductor project in the lab's history, driven by US export controls that cut off China from Nvidia hardware and HBM memory.

ClinePass gives developers access to ten curated open-weight coding models for $9.99 a month, betting the agent harness matters more than the model.

Microsoft is shifting Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing and testing DeepSeek V4 on Azure, trading 57x cheaper tokens for a geopolitical risk that has not gone away.

Artificial Analysis released AgentPerf, the first agentic AI infrastructure benchmark, measuring concurrent agents per megawatt. NVIDIA Blackwell leads with 20x gains over Hopper.

DeepSeek's maiden external funding round is nearing completion at up to $59B valuation, with Tencent and EV battery giant CATL as the biggest outside investors.

China's government has extended travel restrictions to AI researchers at Alibaba, DeepSeek, and other private firms, requiring official approval before they can leave the country.

DeepSeek makes its 75% V4-Pro discount permanent, leaving output tokens 34x cheaper than GPT-5.5 and resetting market expectations for enterprise API costs.

Q2 2026 AI API pricing review: DeepSeek V4 hits the API, GPT-5.5 launches at $5/1M, and overall token costs are down 60-80% year-over-year - but a hidden tokenizer change at Anthropic quietly raised effective prices.

The state of open-source large language models in 2026 - who leads, how close they are to proprietary models, which licenses allow commercial use, and how to access them.

The best LLM APIs under $1 per million input tokens in 2026 - comparing Gemini Flash, DeepSeek V4 Flash, GPT-4.1 Nano, Mistral Small, Qwen3, and Claude Haiku on price and quality.

A practical comparison of every production LLM with a 1M+ token context window - verified pricing, real retrieval notes, and clear picks for different workloads.