OpenAI may cut prices before Anthropic does, report says

OpenAI is reportedly considering steep cuts to its token pricing in a bid to regain enterprise momentum lost to Anthropic, a move that could trigger a broader pricing war across the AI industry and reshape how businesses budget for AI deployment.

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is considering lowering the cost of tokens, tokens being the unit in which AI use is measured and billed in preparation for a corresponding decision from Anthropic.

Anthropic has gained considerable traction in terms of enterprise adoption within a few months of launching its services; this was due primarily to its Claude Code, which has found favour with coders. This has helped Anthropic reach a value higher than that of OpenAI at one point.

OpenAI has followed suit by refocusing its attention on its own coders.

The costs of token use are increasing quickly among corporations, especially for those employing coding assistants, autonomous agents, and productivity solutions that require extensive compute consumption.

Corporate users are becoming more interested in understanding the ROI behind their AI investment, an issue that came up during discussions about the idea of "tokenmaxxing", which is using as many tokens as possible to boost productivity regardless of the ROI.

Reducing the prices of tokens may help to address this issue, but the core problem of ROI will remain regardless.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have invested billions into the necessary infrastructure for training and serving their models to customers at scale. More price cuts can reduce margin further down the line.