OpenAI is considering a major cut to its token pricing in an effort to win back customers from rival Anthropic. According to people familiar with the matter, the price reduction is a preemptive move to prevent Anthropic from dropping its own prices first. As enterprise users grow increasingly frustrated with the high cost of AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently admitted that running costs have become a "huge problem."
The battle for enterprise customers is escalating. After Anthropic's coding assistant Claude Code took the software engineering world by storm, Anthropic's revenue surged and its valuation surpassed OpenAI's for the first time. To catch up, OpenAI has made its own coding tool, Codex, a top priority. But some big clients are tightening their AI budgets. Uber executives, for instance, say they've already exhausted their 2026 budget for agentic AI. This has sparked a debate in Silicon Valley about "tokenmaxxing" — the idea that companies burn through huge numbers of tokens without seeing a clear return on investment.
The price cuts could further squeeze both companies' margins. Processing user queries and tasks already costs them billions of dollars in compute resources each year.