Neither wins outright: OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra is the pick when you need file / PDF input, Sakana: Fugu Ultra when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra | Sakana: Fugu Ultra |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Sakana |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $10.00 | $5.00 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $50.00 | $30.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $20.00 | $11.25 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 3% | 5% |
| Context window | 1.1M tokens (~1,575 pages) | 1M tokens (~1,500 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 93% | 69% |
| Max output per response | 128K tokens (~96,000 words) | 128K tokens (~96,000 words) |
| Input types | file, image, text | text, image |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-04 | 2026-06-24 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra | Sakana: Fugu Ultra | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $1,750 | $975 | Sakana: Fugu Ultra saves $775 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $1,700 | $900 | Sakana: Fugu Ultra saves $800 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $1,800 | $960 | Sakana: Fugu Ultra saves $840 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $1,100 | $580 | Sakana: Fugu Ultra saves $520 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $550 | $280 | Sakana: Fugu Ultra saves $270 |
| Capability | OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra | Sakana: Fugu Ultra | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | ✓ Yes | — | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra is the pick when you need file / PDF input, Sakana: Fugu Ultra when cost matters at scale. In short: OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra when you need file / PDF input, you need seed (reproducible sampling); Sakana: Fugu Ultra when cost matters at scale.
Sakana: Fugu Ultra is cheaper: $11.25 vs $20.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 44% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $975 against $1,750.
OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra costs $10.00 per 1M input tokens and $50.00 per 1M output tokens; Sakana: Fugu Ultra costs $5.00 input and $30.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra: 1.1M tokens, about 1,575 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Sakana: Fugu Ultra.
Tool calling — OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra: yes, Sakana: Fugu Ultra: yes. JSON-schema structured output — OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra: yes, Sakana: Fugu Ultra: yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; Sakana: Fugu Ultra up to 128K (about 96,000 words).
OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra was listed on 2026-09-04; Sakana: Fugu Ultra on 2026-06-24.
GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's flagship model for demanding end-to-end work. It is suited for advanced analysis, software engineering, deep research, scientific work, and document creation, with particular strengths in long-horizon...
Full OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra specs →Fugu Ultra is the higher-performance model in Sakana AI's Fugu family. Rather than a single monolithic model, Fugu is a learned multi-agent orchestration system: a language model trained to route...
Full Sakana: Fugu Ultra specs →