OpenAI is reportedly considering significant cuts to the prices it charges for AI usage. The company is discussing lowering token prices, the unit used to charge developers and businesses for using AI models, as it prepares for tougher competition from Anthropic and other rivals, reports The Wall Street Journal. While no final decision has been made, the discussions suggest that OpenAI is increasingly focused on attracting and retaining users, rather than relying only on having the most advanced models.
The potential price cuts come as many companies are taking a closer look at their AI spending. Over the past two years, businesses rushed to adopt AI tools for coding, customer service, research, content creation, and internal workflows. However, many executives are now asking whether the large AI bills are delivering enough value. Reports suggest that some companies have become concerned about rapidly growing token usage and AI costs, especially when productivity gains are difficult to measure. As a result, price is becoming a much bigger factor in AI purchasing decisions than it was during the early stages of the generative AI boom.
A major reason behind OpenAI’s concerns is the rise of Anthropic. Its Claude family of models has become increasingly popular among developers and enterprise customers, particularly for coding-related tasks. Anthropic’s coding product, Claude Code, has gained a strong reputation among software engineers and has become one of the company’s fastest-growing businesses. This has helped Anthropic win more enterprise customers and challenge OpenAI in a market where ChatGPT and OpenAI’s models once held a clear lead. OpenAI has responded by putting greater focus on its own coding platform, Codex, as competition between the two companies intensifies.
The rivalry has become so intense that it is now attracting significant attention from investors. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly preparing for public-market debuts. Anthropic recently filed confidentially for an IPO, and OpenAI followed with its own confidential filing shortly afterwards. Notably, Anthropic’s latest valuation reached about $965 billion, while OpenAI’s most recent valuation was around $852 billion.
At the same time, running advanced AI systems remains extremely expensive. Every AI query requires powerful GPUs, large data centers, networking infrastructure, and significant electricity consumption. Training and serving frontier AI models costs billions of dollars annually. Unlike traditional software companies, AI providers face substantial costs every time users interact with their models. This means that if OpenAI cuts prices aggressively, it could gain more customers but also put additional pressure on its profit margins.
Competition is also rising beyond the OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry. Google has taken an increasingly aggressive approach to pricing, leveraging its vast cloud infrastructure to make Gemini more attractive to developers and businesses. At Google I/O 2026, the company reduced the price of its premium AI Ultra plan from $250 to $200 per month and introduced a new $100-per-month tier to expand adoption. Google has also positioned Gemini 3.5 Flash as a low-cost, high-volume model, claiming it can deliver token costs that are up to 70% lower than rival frontier models for certain workloads.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
