This is a real shift, not just hype. An 80% price cut on a model that already sits at the top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index among the budget tier is aggressive. Luna at $0.20/M input while posting a higher score than Gemini 3.6 Flash and the current Chinese contenders (GLM-5.2 Max, DeepSeek, MiniMax) changes the value calculation for a lot of production workloads. OpenAI is clearly treating the “cheap but good enough” segment as strategic territory instead of leaving it to the open-source and Chinese labs. Whether the lead holds depends on how fast the others respond with their own cuts or new releases, these charts flip quickly but right now the price-performance gap is wide enough that it will move volume. Users win when the frontier players start competing this hard on cost.