OpenAI vs. Anthropic: A price war over API tokens is brewing

OpenAI is weighing token price cuts to win customers from Anthropic, the Wall Street Journal reports.

At a recent event, CEO Sam Altman said costs have become “a huge issue” for businesses. Anthropic’s coding tool Claude Code recently went viral among developers, and the startup passed OpenAI in valuation for the first time. As AI agents get used more broadly in tools like these, usage costs have climbed, costs that were long covered by flat-rate subscriptions. Most providers have since shifted their enterprise pricing to usage-based billing. In practice, that means the same AI workload that used to cost $200 a month can quickly balloon to several thousand or even tens of thousands of dollars. In this emerging token economy, some enterprise customers are already pulling back on AI spending. A price war could deepen the already billions-deep losses at both companies. OpenAI confidentially filed IPO paperwork this week but likely won’t go public until 2027. Anthropic has also filed its paperwork and plans to list later this year.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1Ad TopStories Microsoft researcher builds a working neural network out of goats in Age of Empires II to critique AI science Amazon and five other companies reportedly triggered the government crackdown on Anthropic’s Fable model KPMG fabricated AI case studies in a report designed to sell clients on AI adoption Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork moves to usage-based billing and may tap DeepSeek Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 closes in on closed-source leaders in coding marathons Don’t MissWhat Matters Stay in the loop on AI. Clear, useful, no fluff. Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.