OpenAI and Anthropic – two of America’s artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers – have slashed access fees for their language models to stop budget-focused enterprise clients from migrating overseas even as they face mounting pressure from low-cost Chinese rivals. The price battle arrives as mounting computing expenses force corporations across Europe and Silicon Valley to curb their usage. This has allowed Chinese developers like DeepSeek and Moonshot to win over major business accounts.
OpenAI has cut the price of access to its fastest and cheapest option, GPT-5.6 Luna, by 80%. Input token rates plummeted from $1 down to $0.20 per million, while output charges dropped from $6 to $1.20 per million. Similarly, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, offering top-tier reasoning at exactly half the rate of its premium Fable 5 tier.
The recent US developer price cuts are mainly on intermediate products, which are designed to be as economical as open-weight alternatives. The pricing battle unfolds as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for initial public offerings (IPOs) at trillion-dollar valuations, all while institutional backers demand clear paths to profit on massive infrastructure expenditures.
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