GPT-5.6 Luna is now the ChatGPT free default, with unlimited chats
Following an 80% price cut on 30 July, Luna became the default model for free ChatGPT users with no chat limit. The capability floor for people who pay nothing just moved substantially.
Free tiers are usually where last year's model goes to be depreciated. Putting a current model there with no usage cap is a different decision, and it is only affordable because the cost of serving it fell 80% two weeks earlier.
The competitive logic is straightforward: the largest consumer AI products are now measured in billions of users, and the differentiator at that scale is not the top of the range but the floor. A free tier that is genuinely good is harder to leave than a paid tier that is slightly better.
It also resets the baseline for everyone building on top. Any product whose value proposition was "better than what you get for free" has to re-establish that against a stronger free option, and that is a large category of AI startups.
The pattern across the week is consistent even where the direction is not: DeepSeek raising a model 93% while OpenAI gives a current model away without limits. Both are position decisions, and neither tells you anything about what serving actually costs.
AI Weekly — AI News Today, August 15 — Top AI Stories & Live Updates → · LLM Stats — LLM News Today (August 2026) — AI Model Releases →