GPT-6.1 Terra is a fast, lower-cost OpenAI model released on 26 October 2026. OpenAI describes it as combining detailed visual reasoning and precise computer use with clearer, more natural writing, for workday tasks like drafting proposals, interpreting technical drawings, filling out forms and editing videos. It is available in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users, and in the API as gpt-6.1-terra.
API pricing: $1 per million input tokens, $0.05 per million cached input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, which OpenAI says is 50% lower than GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol.
What OpenAI reports about computer use
OpenAI measured computer use on Agents' Last Exam, a benchmark of professional tasks such as turning architectural drawings into a 3D model or logging an animated film shot by shot for a restoration team. All figures below are OpenAI's own.
- At medium reasoning effort, Terra scores 15 percentage points higher than GPT-5.6 Terra at about one-third of the cost.
- It performs on par with GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's most capable model, at one-tenth of Astra's price per token.
- At max effort it is over three times as token-efficient as Claude Opus 5.5 at a quarter of the price per token, about 9x lower cost per task.
- It completes tasks more than three times faster than GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol.
Fewer factual errors, better coding
On OpenAI's 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%, and to 4.3% at maximum effort. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Terra solves 50.3% of tasks at max effort, more than double GPT-5.6 Terra's 21.5%. On MMMU-Pro visual reasoning it nearly matches GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol at much lower cost.
When not to use GPT-6.1 Terra
OpenAI states that for the most complex coding tasks, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra remain the better choice. Terra is aimed at high-volume, screen-based work where cost per task decides whether automation pays off, such as reading incoming invoices and entering them into accounting software.
Safety
OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Terra meets the Critical threshold in cybersecurity under its Preparedness Framework and keeps the protections developed for GPT-6 Astra. It also reports stronger resistance to prompt injection and a higher tendency to stay in scope and disclose limitations than GPT-5.6 Terra. If you are putting computer-use agents into production, our courses on securing agentic AI and on agentic design patterns cover the controls to put around them.
