OpenAI business strategy and market competition

OpenAI has initiated a multi-stage strategy to secure business sector dominance by providing high-tier models, facilitating developer application building, and establishing a corporate client marketplace. This period has seen a significant rise in internal AI usage, with research department costs increasing as daily token consumption per researcher grew from $162 in July 2026 to over $600 in August 2026.

As corporate AI spending expands, a price war has emerged, shifting market share toward OpenAI. While Anthropic held approximately three-quarters of spending at the start of the year, usage between the two providers reached an almost even split by September. This shift is driven by OpenAI’s aggressive pricing for its GPT-5.6 lineup, which included an 80 percent price reduction for its Luna model and a 20 percent reduction for its Terra model.

Concurrently, Anthropic has faced operational difficulties, including capacity shortages and outages related to high demand for Claude Code, alongside scrutiny regarding its 30-day user data retention policy.