GPT-5.6 Terra vs GPT-6 Luna

GPT-5.6 Terra is the mid-tier reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes the flagship Sol and the lightweight Luna. Introduced in a limited preview on June 26, 2026, and made broadly available on July 9, 2026, Terra accepts text and image input and produces text output, supporting vision, function calling, tool use, and agentic workflows. It is designed as a balanced option for everyday professional and production workloads — including coding assistance, document analysis, customer support, and multi-step agent tasks — where both output quality and cost efficiency matter. OpenAI positions Terra as delivering performance competitive with GPT-5.5 at approximately half the price, with a context window of around 1,050,000 tokens. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Terra scores 84.3%, matching Claude Fable 5 on that benchmark. Under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, Terra is rated High for cybersecurity and biological capabilities, meaning it demonstrates meaningful capability in those domains without reaching the Critical threshold.

GPT-5.6 introduces a new naming convention in which the generation number (5.6) is paired with a durable capability tier name (Sol, Terra, or Luna), allowing each tier to advance on its own schedule. Terra carries the API identifier gpt-5.6-terra and supports the same reasoning effort controls available across the family, including adjustable reasoning depth. The model includes prompt caching with explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life, with cache writes billed at 1.25x the uncached input rate and cache reads receiving a 90% discount. GPT-5.6 Terra is a proprietary, closed-weights model served through the OpenAI API, Codex, and ChatGPT.

GPT-6 Luna is the fast, cost-efficient tier of OpenAI's GPT-6 model family, sitting below GPT-6 Sol and the larger GPT-6 Astra model that opened the generation. It is a proprietary multimodal transformer that accepts text and image input and returns text, and it exposes an adjustable reasoning effort setting so the same model can run in a low-latency mode or spend additional inference compute on harder problems. OpenAI positions it for high-volume and latency-sensitive workloads such as conversational assistants, classification, and lightweight agentic pipelines, while noting that at higher reasoning effort it handles software engineering and computer-use tasks that previously required a Sol-tier model.

The model supports a context window of roughly 1,050,000 input tokens with a maximum output of 128,000 tokens, which allows long documents, extended agent traces, and large code repositories to be processed in a single request. OpenAI describes the GPT-6 generation as improving factual reliability and adopting a more concise communication style relative to the GPT-5.6 series, and attributes the efficiency of the Sol and Luna tiers to gains in caching and inference rather than to reduced capability. Architecture details, parameter counts, and training data are not published.