gpt-oss-safeguard-20b: pricing, context and benchmarks

What you need to know about gpt-oss-safeguard-20b

OpenAI, based in United States, put gpt-oss-safeguard-20b online on October 29, 2025. It accepts text as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 131,072 tokens, larger than 29 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 65,536 tokens in one go.

It has been available for about 12 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

gpt-oss-safeguard-20b pricing

On OpenRouter, gpt-oss-safeguard-20b costs $0.08 per million input tokens and $0.3 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.131 per million, more expensive than 14 % of paid models (5.8 times cheaper than the median of $0.76).

A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.0003. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $9 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.038 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for gpt-oss-safeguard-20b. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Features, privacy and local use

• It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
• It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
• It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.

Its weights are open and downloadable from Hugging Face: you can run it on your own machines without sending your data to a third party.

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