OpenAI plans price cuts as Anthropic’s surge fuels AI pricing war

OpenAI is reportedly evaluating significant reductions to the token prices it charges developers and enterprises, a move aimed at countering Anthropic’s rapid capture of corporate customers driven by its Claude Code coding agent. Anthropic’s annualised revenue is estimated to have grown to about $47 billion by May 2026 and it recorded its first profitable quarter in Q2 2026, while OpenAI posted a 122 % adjusted operating margin loss in Q1 2026 and saw its share of global generative‑AI web traffic fall by nearly 24 percentage points.

Both companies are preparing for high‑valuation IPOs—OpenAI at a private valuation of $852 billion and Anthropic after a $65 billion Series H round valuing it at $965 billion. The looming price war could further erode margins as neither has demonstrated sustainable profitability. Chinese open‑source provider DeepSeek already offers frontier‑quality models at a fraction of the cost, pricing its V4 Flash at $0.14 per million input tokens versus OpenAI’s $5 per million.

Analysts note that subscription plans for the leading chat‑bot services become unprofitable at modest usage levels; heavy enterprise consumption can generate computing costs of thousands of dollars per month, with some firms spending hundreds of millions in a single month. Companies are increasingly routing simple queries to cheaper models and shifting workloads to open‑source alternatives to curb expenses.