OpenAI is considering significantly lowering the fees it charges users in an effort to win customers away from rival Anthropic. The company is weighing significant cuts in the fees it charges per token, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is in response to expected similar price cuts from Anthropic, these people said.
Business executives have begun to express dissatisfaction with the high cost of using AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a recent event that cost has become "a huge issue.""I think we're going to have multiple ways to help users get more value for less," he said.
The steep price cuts could eat into profit margins at both companies, which have lost billions due to the huge cost of computing resources required for AI systems to process queries and perform tasks.
OpenAI is trying to catch up with its younger rivals in the race for enterprise customers, who are paying top dollar for AI tools that make them more productive. Anthropic's revenue has surged recently after its coding tool Claude Code became an instant hit among software engineers, and the five-year-old startup surpassed OpenAI's valuation for the first time. Since then, OpenAI has also listed its own coding tool Codex as a key development project of the company.
Some companies have invested so much money in Anthropic products that their executives are now seeking to rein in spending. Earlier this year, an Uber executive said the company had exhausted its 2026 budget for autonomous AI, or agent AI; another business leader said last month that it would be difficult to directly tie efficiency gains from AI coding to new customer capabilities.
Such comments from many executives have sparked a debate in Silicon Valley about “token maximization,” or using tokens as much as possible to increase productivity, including in ways that don’t generate a return on investment.
The price war will be an early test of the strength of both companies' business models ahead of their much-anticipated listings. OpenAI and Anthropic account for the majority of revenue from new AI products, fueling their rise. But one potential risk that investors have long identified is the fungibility of their products, and the ease with which customers can abandon one for another.
OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO earlier this week, hot on the heels of Anthropic. In a recent Slack message to employees, Altman said the company plans to go public "within a year."
The company said in a confidential filing that "there are some things that may be easier for us to do as a private company," but declined to elaborate further.