AI Pulse · Frontier Labs Watch

OpenAI just made GPT-5.6 Luna, its cheapest model, the default for anyone on ChatGPT’s Free and Go tiers, and it comes with unlimited text chats. This follows an 80% price cut on the model’s API cost back in late July. Put those two moves together and the message is pretty clear: OpenAI wants as many people as possible using ChatGPT for free, with no chat limits to bump into.

Here’s the part that matters more for business owners. OpenAI has also confirmed that ads are landing on the European free tier this month. That is not a small side experiment. A free model with unlimited use, paired with ads, is a classic consumer funnel. Get people hooked on the free version, keep them there as long as possible, and monetize the attention through advertising rather than subscriptions alone. That is a very different bet than Anthropic, which has been leaning hard into enterprise deals and paid implementation services. One lab is building a mass consumer habit. The other is building corporate relationships. Neither is wrong, but they point to different futures for what “using AI” even means for the average person, as detailed in this report.

If you run a business, this affects you even if you never touch ChatGPT’s free tier yourself. Your customers, employees, and job applicants are going to be forming their AI habits on a free, ad-supported product. That shapes expectations about what AI should cost and how it should behave. Worth watching as you think about your own AI tools and policies, and it’s the kind of shift we track closely for clients building out an AI command centre.