OpenAI is considering cutting prices drastically to win more business clients amidst stiffening competition, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The AI startup is in a fight for customers at a time when rival Anthropic has been surging ahead in the enterprise AI market. Anthropic’s valuation recently surpassed OpenAI’s for the first time, as its Claude Code tool became popular among developers.
OpenAI’s price cuts would focus on tokens, the metric by which AI usage is counted.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a recent event that AI costs have become “a huge issue,” the paper reported. He also said OpenAI will offer several options for people to get more value for less money.
With the cost of computing AI high, lowering prices would erode profit margins for both startups, which are already losing billions of dollars, the Journal said.
Companies are starting to rein in AI spending. Uber recently said the company had already spent its entire 2026 budget for agentic AI.
If a price war breaks out, it would test the business models of OpenAI and Anthropic, which are the two leaders in frontier AI models. This week, OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO, a week after Anthropic did the same.