Chinese developers are climbing the firewall to pay more for GPT-5.6, and doing the maths on why
TL;DR
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 release (Sol, Terra, Luna) is winning praise from users in mainland China who reach the blocked service via VPNs, despite costing several times more per token than Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 or DeepSeek V4. Their argument is that per-token pricing is the wrong metric: Artificial Analysis found GPT-5.6 finished coding-agent tasks using roughly a ninth of the output tokens DeepSeek V4 needed, while scoring higher. Efficiency, not the rate card, is what lands on the invoice.
OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 models are winning praise from an unlikely group. Users in mainland China, where the service is blocked and reachable only by VPN or third-party proxy, told the South China Morning Post the models are worth the extra cost.
That is a striking verdict, because the extra cost is not small. Chinese frontier models undercut OpenAI by a wide margin.
The release, which landed after US government approval, brought three...
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