OpenAI and Anthropic cut AI model prices as Chinese rivals grow

In short: OpenAI and Anthropic are lowering prices for some AI models as more customers consider cheaper Chinese alternatives.

What's going on

OpenAI and Anthropic, two leading US AI companies, are cutting prices on some of their models to keep customers from switching to lower-cost rivals, including Chinese developers like Moonshot and DeepSeek.

OpenAI said it cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 per cent. Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 and said it offers similar top-level ability at half the price of its most capable model, Fable 5. Anthropic also cancelled a planned price increase for its Sonnet 5 model that had been set for September.

Many business customers pay based on usage. They are often billed by “tokens”, which are small chunks of text the model reads and writes (like charging by the number of words you send in and get back). Financial Times reporting cited Silicon Data’s token price index, which said customers’ prices for models from top US labs have fallen by almost a quarter since mid-July.

A big pressure point is that some Chinese “open” models can be downloaded and adjusted by developers, which can make them cheaper to run. Some companies, including DoorDash and Airbnb, have said they started using Chinese-made models to reduce their AI bills.

What to watch

Headline prices can be misleading, because a stronger model can sometimes finish a job using fewer tokens and fewer retries. Still, if cheaper models keep getting close in quality, more companies may treat AI like a utility and shop mainly on price, especially for everyday tasks. That could also affect how investors judge US AI firms that are considering stock market listings at very high valuations.

Source: Financial Times