OpenAI and Anthropic Enter Price War Ahead of IPO

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on June 10 (local time) that OpenAI, the operator of ChatGPT, is considering a significant price reduction in order to attract Anthropic's enterprise clients.

According to sources, OpenAI is reviewing plans to substantially lower the price of “tokens,” which serve as both the billing standard and the unit for measuring usage. This move is in response to expectations that Anthropic will implement a similar price cut.

OpenAI logo. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News

Recently, enterprise customers have been expanding their use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to boost productivity. Anthropic's “Claude Code” has been gaining popularity among software engineering clients through word-of-mouth, and OpenAI is strengthening its own coding tool, “Codex,” in an effort to catch up with Claude Code.

However, during this process, client companies have expressed concerns about the high costs of AI usage. Some enterprises are spending so much on AI that their management teams are now seeking to reduce expenditures. Earlier this year, it was reported that Uber had already exhausted its budget allocated for agent-based AI usage. There are also criticisms that “tokenmaxxing”—the practice of increasing AI usage unnecessarily as token consumption becomes a productivity metric—has been spreading.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, mentioned the cost issue at a recent event, stating, “I think there will be many ways we can help people get more value for less money.”

WSJ pointed out that if OpenAI and Anthropic both implement drastic price reductions, there are concerns that their profits could deteriorate further. Both companies are already incurring multi-billion-dollar losses due to enormous spending on computing resources. Investors note that the products of both companies are easily substitutable, making it easy for customers to switch between them. The outlet further predicted that this price war will serve as a test of how robust each company’s business model is ahead of their respective initial public offerings (IPO).

On June 1, Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), aiming to go public as early as October this year. OpenAI also made a confidential IPO filing on June 8. In a recent message to employees, CEO Altman stated, “We plan to go public by next year.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.