Anthropic and OpenAI Launch Low-Cost AI Models Side by Side, Intensifying Price Competition

Anthropic and OpenAI have both unveiled new low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) models. As Chinese companies are increasing their market share with affordable AI models, American AI firms are also joining the price competition in earnest.

Reuters Yonhap News

On September 22 (local time), Anthropic introduced its new AI model, "Claude Opus 5.5." This model offers performance comparable to its top-tier "Claude Fable 5.1" but at a lower cost.

Anthropic set the price for Opus 5.5 at $4 per 1 million input tokens and $20 per 1 million output tokens. A token is a unit of data used by AI to process questions and answers. Anthropic explained that Opus 5.5 delivers similar performance to Fable 5.1 in most tasks, while being 40% cheaper than its predecessor.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released its highest-performing model, ChatGPT-6 Astra, and on the same day launched its new budget models, Sol and Luna. Sol and Luna are priced 50% lower than previous models in the ChatGPT-5.6 series. OpenAI’s higher-end Sol model costs $2 per 1 million input tokens and $10 per 1 million output tokens. The lightweight Luna model is available for just $0.10 and $0.50, respectively.

The competition between these two leading AI companies has now moved beyond pure technological supremacy to securing corporate clients by balancing both price and performance.

It's believed that the background to this price competition lies in the expanding market share of low-cost Chinese models. Anthropic and OpenAI are currently facing increasing competition from Chinese-made "open-weight" models. As open-weight models—ones that allow users to customize and run the models on their own hardware—become more widespread, they are eroding the market share of American AI companies. According to data from cloud application company Vercel, most of these models were developed in China.

Additionally, both companies are under pressure to sustain growth as they are planning initial public offerings (IPOs) in the medium to long term, which also plays a role in driving this price competition.

Anthropic is working to expand its customer base ahead of its IPO scheduled for this fall. Investors are closely monitoring whether Anthropic can maintain its current rapid growth in the face of intensifying competition and increasing price sensitivity among customers. OpenAI, too, has significantly reduced its model prices in recent months to boost growth, which had slowed at the start of the year.

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