On 5 November 2026, OpenAI’s GPT-Image-2.6, shipped on 4 November, and Google’s Nano Banana 2.1, shipped on 6 October, are about a month apart in age and within about a cent of each other per picture, while neither is ranked first by the independent boards. Artificial Analysis has no row for GPT-Image-2.6, while Nano Banana 2.1 sits fourth on its text-to-image board at 1,175 Elo from 6,322 votes and fourth on its editing board at 1,151 from 7,009 votes. Google’s release, API ID gemini-nano-banana-2.1 and built on Gemini 3.6 Flash, cut image output tokens from $60 to $30 per million, halving the cost of a 1K render to $0.0336 and a 2K render to $0.0504, and left 4K at $0.113 because the higher resolution carries 3,780 image tokens rather than 2,520; it added a named resolution ladder, a fourth reference slot count, and search grounding. OpenAI’s GPT-Image-2.6 held the rate card at $5 per million text input tokens, $8 per million image input tokens, and $30 per million image output tokens, and added a complexity control, markup-guided editing, SVG export, animated GIF output