According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is actively reducing AI pricing as the company faces intensifying competition with rival Anthropic. The company is making big cuts to the pricing of tokens, the units of data that AI companies use to measure and bill usage of their models, as reported by people familiar with the matter. The move comes as businesses increasingly scrutinize the cost of deploying AI tools, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledging that AI expenses had become "a huge issue" for customers. As Altman stated, "We are continuing to push on that more with models. I think we'll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend." The potential reductions come as both companies are looking to capture a bigger share of enterprise customers ahead of their much-publicised IPOs.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic's annualized run rate stood at roughly $1 billion at the start of 2025, but by April 2026, that figure had reached $30 billion. CEO Dario Amodei described this trajectory as outstripping the company's own forecasts by a factor of eight. Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of its public launch in May 2025 and surpassed $2.5 billion by February 2026. Business subscriptions to Claude Code quadrupled in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with some analysts now estimating Anthropic's annualized revenue may have crossed $47 billion by May 2026. After the latest funding rounds, Anthropic was valued at $947.18 billion compared to OpenAI's private market valuation of $832.76 billion, according to data from Nasdaq Private Market.
According to reports from The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI reported a revenue run rate of approximately $13 billion in 2025 and does not expect to turn a profit or generate positive free cash flow until 2030. This significant gap in growth trajectory, not just in current revenue, is what makes Anthropic's rise threatening enough to prompt a pricing response from OpenAI. A price war could pressure profit margins at both companies, which continue to spend billions of dollars on computing infrastructure needed to run advanced AI models. The report notes that both AI startups already lose billions of dollars on the enormous computing needs required for running AI models for tasks such as processing queries and carrying out other functions. OpenAI appears to have lost its lead to Anthropic, prompting the company to plan an effort to catch up in the competitive landscape.
According to the latest reports, OpenAI is looking to catch up to Anthropic in the race to win over enterprise users, who are spending massive amounts of money to improve workforce productivity. Anthropic's revenue surge came after the company released its AI-powered coding tool, Claude Code, which gained significant market share among software engineers. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been working on improving its own AI coding assistant, Codex. A recent report by Financial Times noted that OpenAI is working on a ChatGPT "super app" that combines AI agents, coding tools and third-party services. The competition has reached such intensity that some companies have spent so much money on Anthropic's AI that their leaders have been forced to rein in spending. Uber CTO Praveen Neppali Naga told The Information that the company was "back to the drawing board" after blowing past its full-year AI budget after a surge in usage of AI-powered coding tools.
The pricing moves are creating significant industry debate about the sustainability of AI economics. As Citadel Securities argued in a new note titled "Tokenomics," even the most powerful frontier technology still has to pass through the boring discipline of cost curves, capacity limits, and marginal returns. "Adoption is no longer about what AI can do in principle. It's becoming about the price and scarcity of the inputs needed to run it at scale," according to the hedge fund's report. The broader pattern is clear: pricing pressure in the AI model market is accelerating, with experts questioning whether "gravity about to re-emerge for LLM token prices" as demand for compute resources continues to surge. Recent reports from Bloomberg note that Uber has introduced spending limits on AI-powered tools, setting employees' AI spending at $1,500 per month in tokens for each AI coding tool. Microsoft has also urged its employees to stop using Claude Code and instead move towards its own Github Copilot CLI, as per an internal memo quoted by The Verge.
