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

OpenAI is weighing token price cuts to win customers from Anthropic. The company expects Anthropic to make similar moves, according to the Wall Street Journal. 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.