Competitive Brief: Call Sheet
Researched: OpenAI · for Mistral reps
Focus: enterprise and sovereign AI for developers and agents
Today's angle
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay on September 29, 2026, an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol that it says nearly matches its GPT-6 Astra flagship on agentic coding, computer use and professional work at one fifth of Astra's standard token prices. In the API it lists at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.10 per million. It is available now in ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API as gpt-6.1-sol, though not yet in the main ChatGPT chat.
Top 2 plays
PLAY 01
Open weights beat OpenAI on price, and OpenAI just raised what its Codex seats cost.
OpenAI's flagship GPT-6 Astra lists at $10 per million input tokens and $50 output, 2.5x what GPT-5.6 Sol charged. Its GPT-6.1 Sol undercuts that at $2 input and $10 output, but Mistral Medium 3.5 is still lower at $1.50 and $7.50. On seats, OpenAI is cutting Pro 200 usage in half from October 30 (20x the Plus allowance down to 10x) at the same $200 price. Keeping the old workload means the $500 Pro 500 plan, a 2.5x bigger bill. Self-hosting Devstral 2 and our other Apache 2.0 models drops per-token cost to your own compute, with no allowance a vendor can cut.
OpenAI just halved the usage in its $200 plan, so keeping the same Codex workload now costs 2.5 times as much. Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper per token, and self-hosted Devstral has no allowance for anyone to cut.
PLAY 02
Vibe still bundles work automation and coding under one license, and OpenAI's answer stays cloud only.
Work Mode runs long-running multi-step tasks across Google Workspace, Outlook, SharePoint, Slack and GitHub after a plan sign-off. Code Mode launches remote coding agents in isolated sandboxes, ships reviewable pull requests, runs sessions in parallel and keeps sessions alive while the machine is off, with a VS Code extension across the whole project. OpenAI's ChatGPT Work now folds chat, work automation and Codex coding into one subscription too, so the single-license bundle is matched, but it stays cloud-hosted, so Mistral's self-host and sovereignty edge holds. Pricing: Free, Pro at $14.99 a month, Team at $24.99 per user a month, Enterprise.
Vibe gives your team work automation and a coding agent in one license you can also run on your own infrastructure, starting at $14.99 a month.
Objection handling
"Mistral is small. Will you even be around in three years?"
Counter: Point to the closed, Samsung-led €21 billion round, Microsoft's multibillion dollar bet and five named enterprises locked into no-early-exit, five-year commitments funding the compute buildout, then close on the fact that Apache 2.0 weights mean your production system never depends on our uptime.
"Mistral's models aren't as good as GPT-6 Astra."
Counter: Move the evaluation to the buyer's deployment constraints and running cost, where our edge is structural: private repos with no call home, running on hardware they already own.
"Your ecosystem is smaller, with fewer integrations and guides."
Counter: Ask the buyer which platforms their workflow runs on, then map Vibe's connectors and Mistral's Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio and Azure Local availability against that list on the call.
"Isn't OpenAI the safe default everyone already uses?"
Counter: three halts to OpenAI's frontier plans in three months, the latest days before its own developer conference. Open weights let you keep the version you validated, air-gapped inside your own walls, on your own timeline.
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