OpenAI released GPT-4.5 on Thursday, just one day after Anthropic launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet and merely a week following xAI’s Grok-3 debut and DeepSeek’s announcement of a new model coming soon.
And expensive is the operative word here. OpenAI’s new model comes with an eye-watering API price tag of $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens.
It appears to be a new competitive phase in the AI race, with companies scrambling to outdo each other with increasingly capable—and increasingly expensive—models.
For context, that’s ten times pricier than Claude 3.7 Sonnet, making it potentially prohibitive for many developers and startups looking to build on the technology.
GPT-4o (its predecessor) cost $2.50 per 1M tokens of input and $10.00 per 1M tokens of output—making GPT-4.5 2900% more expensive to input and 1300% dearer to get a response.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, didn’t shy away from acknowledging the model’s massive resource requirements in his announcement. «Bad news: It is a giant, expensive model,» he said.
«A heads up: this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. It’s a different kind of intelligence,» Altman said. “There’s a magic to it I haven’t felt before.”