GPT-5.6 Sol just got a surprise 50% discount on OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway. The standard API price dropped from $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens to $2.50 and $15, and the promo runs through September 18.
But OpenAI's own API pricing hasn't budged — it's still $5 and $30. The discount only applies to requests billed through those platforms, so if you bring your own OpenAI API key, you're paying full price. That makes this a channel-limited promotional sale, not an official GPT-5.6 Sol price cut.
SemiAnalysis suspects there's a marketing play here. OpenRouter and Vercel both publish token usage and market share data, making them a key public window into AI model adoption. If the discount temporarily doubles Sol's usage, OpenAI's share on those public leaderboards would spike too.
So far, there's no evidence the company is deliberately pulling this off just to farm leaderboards.