OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/openai-mulls-slashing-prices-ahead-of-competition-from-anthropic-wsj.html

by agentifysh • 1 month ago

135 142 1 month ago

How does OpenAI plan to be profitable?

Economies of scale, optimization of models, hardware, energy infrastructure, data center construction and operation, etc. Stuff is currently relatively inefficient and there's lots of room for optimization. All the usual stuff.

senectus12• 1 month ago

Last man standing monopoly.

lelanthran5• 1 month ago

Economies of scale,

"We lose money on every customer, but we'll make it up in volume" :-)

Hamuko• 1 month ago

Is that even the plan, or is the plan to make a huge IPO while there's still hype and run off with the money?

dgellow• 1 month ago

Running off with money to be burned by your infra is a pretty terrible plan

testfrequency• 1 month ago

Ads of course

ian-clark• 1 month ago

Surveillance, user data, government contracts, military technology, and ads. I don’t actually know this, just guessing based off other big companies and what they’ve done with the current government.

outside1234• 1 month ago

Is OpenAI bankrupt yet?

declan_roberts• 1 month ago

You and I like Claude because it's the best for coding but the normies love chatGPT. ChatGPT has a huge market target.

pixel_popping• 1 month ago

Maybe stop the "news" for a bit?

seydor• 1 month ago

i wonder what % of Anthropic's subscriptions is annual vs monthly

irjustin• 1 month ago

We run monthly. It seems like every few months there's a reason to swap in/out of a particular vendor. Specifically I use all 3 pro then either chat or claude will have a 5x max depending if they're the good thing to be using during that those 3 months.

glaucon• 1 month ago

Wasn't this move meant to be delayed until after the IPO?

Overpower04162• 1 month ago

This pre-IPO battle is very entertaining. Curious how it all ends

nelsonic• 1 month ago

Bankruptcy? How much longer can they sell a dollar for 50c?

tty456• 1 month ago

How long did AMZN do it for?

pseudosavant• 1 month ago

Increasingly it looks like it will end with a bubble bursting. LLMs and AI will survive, like the internet survived the dotcom bubble. But OpenAI and Anthropic could just be today's AOL and Yahoo.

Overpower04162• 1 month ago

I hope it will also crash hardware pricing so it becomes economically feasible to run your own local model. Currently I don’t like where we are heading with the sabotaging models because its “too dangerous”

mk89• 1 month ago

I used to think of a bubble too.

However, I think actually that while it won't give the results expected (AI agents run the company, build all features, etc.), it will nevertheless become a developer tool like IDEs, something "you have to have".

It's here to stay but probably with more realistic expectations than some CEO/CTO are pushing for (agents for everything, nobody writes 1 LOC, self healing systems, etc).

So the market expectations will be probably resized, but these tools are here to stay. Be it for cybersecurity (from CVEs to cyber warfare) alone, that's already worth all the money they are throwing a it.

senectus12• 1 month ago

if cutting prices is the definition of the race then its a race to the bottom.

These moves will only accelerate it.

xyzal2• 1 month ago

By socializing the losses of course.

vkazanov• 1 month ago

That's easy.

More tokens and bigger models pre-ipo to attract attention, limit everything post-ipo.

They did it before, will do it after.

hajile• 1 month ago

It reminds me of the Chinese bike wars where everyone was slashing prices trying to keep marketshare until the bubble burst and everyone lost billions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU

jb_briant• 1 month ago

It's all speculation.

Reality is Fable is x2 price increase against previous.

GPT5.5 is x2 price increase against previous. And after the last week reset, codex is hungry for your sub allowance.

Everybody can see that the massive raises are not matching the revenue, at all.

It's a surprising headline. Yes it does make sense to cut the price to gain market share, but it also make sense to keep it at a sustainable level, which seems to not have been reached yet.

andai• 1 month ago

Fable is twice the size of Opus from what I gathered. So I'm not sure if 2x price translates to 2x profits as well.

Not sure about GPT but it seems plausible they've also been increasing the model size with recent releases. (Progressively training a bigger model and easing into a profitable price range for that model scale?)

miyuru• 1 month ago

it looks like all AI is following the same pattern as GPT-3 again, building bigger models to achieve better results.

thewhitetulip• 1 month ago

Opus 4.8 cost 2x than 4.7 But to compensate for that Claude Code limits wete doubled

This was a week after deepseek slashed prices!

WhitneyLand• 1 month ago

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release.

The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.

If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

stingraycharles2• 1 month ago

It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users.

I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

kennywinker• 1 month ago

They keep asking chatgpt how to monetize and it keeps giving slop answers?

jillesvangurp2• 1 month ago

I think this is too simplistic. Codex is increasingly useful for business usage. I use it for both technical stuff and doing non technical things with my inbox, google drive, etc. It's pretty good for that. And it's pretty clear that business users are very much untapped potential at this point. They need proper agents with tunable guard rails and all the rest.

It seems very competent at coding tasks as well. I don't think Anthropic has a huge edge on that front. It's more of a neck and neck race with proponents in both camps. I ignore most benchmarks at this point; I don't think they have much relevance for normal users.

I think it's actually necessary for both to try out different approaches. Nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to the UX of these things.

broodbucket2• 1 month ago

They have the consumer market but want the enterprise market, because it's a lot more lucrative, so they're probably going to just keep chasing that even though there's no signs they'll stop losing to Anthropic. They don't need to do that much to keep the consumer market because of momentum.

harrouet• 1 month ago

OpenAI actually never had a focus. Their VC pith was: once the AI is good enough, it will find our business model. They've raised money on that.

With that said you are right, it seems OpenAI got numbed by ChatGPT's initial success and tried to be the go-to brand for consumers... which is Google's playground.

Meanwhile, Anthropic led the B2B market with a clever segmented approach, and got well-paying customers.

solumunus2• 1 month ago

Because they gained a HUGE amount of “normal” users and I think they feel desperate to monetise that. It’s their potential massive edge on competition, they just haven’t found any way to realise it and I suspect they won’t.

ethbr1• 1 month ago

I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy

Resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I've been inside companies that have struggled with this, and the real internal story goes like this:

   1. Surprise product growth
   2. Revenue go brr, org expands
   3. Everyone gets promoted as org expands
   4. Because the product sold itself, there was little selection pressure on the sales / customer success orgs to evaluate their effectiveness
   5. Leadership gets saturated with people who just aren't very good at their job
   6. None of those people get fired/demoted, because the company never had to develop "What to do with a bad leader?" muscles
   7. This eventually manifests as an increasing (customer) <-> (engineering) disconnect (as sales/cs aren't doing their job)
   8. People begin to ask why the company isn't doing (insert obvious thing)
   9. It's because VP-of-whatever is chasing fantasies instead of reporting customer needs to engineering

Tl;dr - Don't trust promotions made during the good times. Continuously reevaluate leaders.

mattjoyce• 1 month ago

At the right price, these model don't need to be the best, good enough will do. I think we're fast approaching good enough for most users.

boc• 1 month ago

OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

kouteiheika2• 1 month ago

This. Here's a quick experiment I did yesterday.

I got a new $20 Claude subscription to try the new Fable model. I gave it a single prompt, and it barely finished, using up my whole session quota (it was at ~95% when it finished) and 10% of my weekly quota.

For comparison, with the Kimi Code $40 subscription I can pretty much constantly run two/three agents in parallel for the whole week, and I never run out of quota. I can blindly throw it at anything and everything without worrying about hitting the limits. (And it's not exactly a cheap model to run -- it has 1 trillion parameters!)

Is Kimi as good as Claude? Of course not. But you don't need the absolute state-of-art for most things. If I don't have exceptionally difficult tasks it makes no sense to use it. Just throw Kimi at it, and even if it needs to run 2 or 3 times longer in the background I don't care, because I'm not running out of tokens there.

JKCalhoun• 1 month ago

Not only that, it's easy to let ethics steer my choice as well. And at this point I suspect OpenAI will never earn my respect.

panos_news• 1 month ago

Yeah, that's how I feel too. I am totally fine with xHigh GPT 5.5 when it comes to coding.

opennash• 1 month ago

agreed, unlimited gpt5.5 fast is sufficient for 90% of my use cases. Tried Fable, nice to have but we don't really need it.

emodendroket3• 1 month ago

I find it is a quite reliable workflow to ask a strong model to design a plan and then point a weaker one at executing. The agent harnesses themselves are baking in similar concepts though.

d--b• 1 month ago

The benchmark is not everything, the LLMs have their “personality” and GPT is annoying AF.

Also, I don’t about others, but I personally strongly dislike OpenAI’s leadership’s hypocrisy. I find them losing the race highly satisfying.

SilverElfin• 1 month ago

I don’t think Mythos/Fable matter in attracting customers. The typical use is not going to be on the most expensive model, especially with all its frustrating gotchas like refusing harmless prompts and forcing companies to have their data retained.

If OpenAI can offer an alternative to Opus but with better pricing, it will boost their revenue at Anthropic’s cost, in time for the IPO.

lelanthran5• 1 month ago

If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

This specific crown (Best Performing Model) appears to be made out of thorns: pay 100x more for maybe a 10% improvement in capabilities.

Not sure what the goal is, here.

mnicky3• 1 month ago

It's simple I think - over time the price will go down. According to some analyses the price for equal intelligence declined 10-1000x per year, depending on the domain.

It probably won't be the same again but I still think we can bet on radically cheaper Mythos level intelligence in the future.

jrsj• 1 month ago

The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.

Initially I had the same thought but I think this might actually have more to do with Fable being removed from the Claude subscription later this month. At that point it becomes cost prohibitive to use for most tasks anyways & this is the perfect opportunity to compete on price, especially given enterprise customers are already looking to improve spend management

andrewstuart• 1 month ago

Nothing to do with price.

Claude actually works - unless OpenAI can do that it would make no difference if it was free.

It works unbelievably well actually - it’s truly amazing.

GaggiX• 1 month ago

Codex also works, before Opus 4.8 and Fable it wasn't very clear who had the best agentic model.

tailscaler2026• 1 month ago

OpenAI is full of Trump/MAGA supporters and actively encourages using AI to kill people.

More than happy to watch them lose the global consumer market while they compete with Palantir for DoD contracts.

dannyw• 1 month ago

Competition is lovely. And ironically, OpenAI will probably get and keep lots of enterprise customers like Microsoft^ that won’t accept anything less of ZDR.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/report/947575/microsoft-claude-fabl...

olmo23• 1 month ago

ZDR = Zero Data Retention

sghiassy• 1 month ago

No moat!

Think about where any of them will be in 20 years

On device AI?

arjie• 1 month ago

I’d upgrade ChatGPT for the family but I have them in an enterprise plan so I can distribute custom GPTs easily and that’s incompatible. Ah well.

istvan0• 1 month ago

They cut prices and get more customers who are going to move to the next vendor that cuts prices even more or when they jack up the prices again.

I am not complaining, I like my investor subsidised tokens, I don't see what these companies see as their end goal when it's becoming more and more possible to run a competent LLM locally(even with today's RAM prices).

I am surprised that there is no Claude or ChatGPT machine that I could buy, I feel like they should be opening up that model, but I guess subscriptions look better on balance sheets.

xyzal2• 1 month ago

I think it is time to start shorting.

Uptrenda• 1 month ago

Too bad codex still sucks. Anthropic could double their prices tomorrow and I'd probably still pay it.

mentalgear2• 1 month ago

And openAI's discounts are not enforcing that it is a quality product.

byzantinegene2• 1 month ago

you're not a corporation, corporations are price-sensitive and the decision-makers are typically not the end-users.

bob10292• 1 month ago

I have a really strong suspicion that there is something different about OAI prepaid tokens in the API vs elsewhere. I've been able to get away with spending less than $150/m on average while many peers are hitting 10x that.

I am curious how many on HN have manually configured their copilot install with a custom OAI token for 5.4/5.5. In my experience, the performance difference over the built in subscription models is immense. This setup tends to solve the problem so quickly and reliably that any desire to have it run while I'm asleep seems absolutely ridiculous. The performance is constant throughout the day and week.

I think what might be happening is that we are chasing the cost optimization rabbit a little bit too hard. Capability is weird dimension to quantify. A weaker model is not weaker in a linear way. It's usually this incredibly tall brick wall of a discrete go/no-go. If the model can't do the task, it doesn't matter how cheap the tokens are. Something approaching the inverse is also largely true.

Focus on the capability (is this giving my customer what they want) instead of the cost, and you will likely find that the cost never reaches a threshold where you even begin to worry about it. Starting from a position of cost optimization tends to spiral into a dark place.

throawayonthe• 1 month ago

any desire to have it run while I'm asleep seems absolutely ridiculous.

could that be the difference from your peers? :p (real question b/c if you brought it up you're probably seeing others do it)

bob10292• 1 month ago

The point I'm trying to make is the reason a lot of people are resorting to the 24/7 Ralph loops is because they're using weaker models that need an incredible number of attempts to make any progress. The Death Star has different game theoretic implications. You probably don't need it to be lasering entire planets while you sleep, assuming the laser system actually works as advertised. I've never had a copilot run that took so long that I had to get up from my PC. Maybe 10 minutes. What the hell can run for 24 hours and still converge in a meaningful way?

mentalgear2• 1 month ago

I haven't used OpenAI for months since them supporting the warmongers officially, and I have to say not only don't I miss them - I barely think about them expect for their "please come back" emails from my account I haven't deleted yet unfortunately.

rich_sasha• 1 month ago

Lots of comparisons to eg. Amazon, and how both were burning money for ages.

Maybe the better comparison is Uber? I.e. a commoditised product (taxis on an app), burning money to directly subsidise and gain market share. I always thought it was utterly insane and a waste of money... But you'd be hard pressed to have not made money on Uber.

This is my understanding anyway. A LLM-generated summary suggests that anyone who invested pre-IPO got at least 8-10% annually compounded. Even Series G investors made 2.3x since then. It's not an Eldorado and has to make up for all the losers in the VC portfolio but it's money made, not a smouldering crater of losses.

And after going public, return from IPO is 9.4% compounded. Price is 40% below all time high in October 25 but hey that's a harsh criterion for a long term investment.

The reason why I think it's a good point of comparison is that there's no moat, plenty of competition, heavily subsidised for years by literally burning cash, now seemingly profitable and a reasonably sane PE ratio of 17.

Of course one difference is that a major cost item for LLM companies is building genuinely new, cutting edge engineering/science products whereas for Uber, I never understood why they need the 1000s of technical staff to deliver a taxi app.

I don't know about the ins and outs of the business models of either LLM providers or Uber but keen to hear from people who have insights.

grebc• 1 month ago

It’s all about the equity.

Not sure why people are talking about revenue and profits. Sam & co are about to make ridiculous bank.

m4rtink• 1 month ago

Yes, please, do it, slash the prices, ideally to zero, immediately!

That way you will loose money even faster and we can finally get ridd of this nonsense even sooner.

cmiles8• 1 month ago

This is the race to the bottom setup that will tank these companies in their attempts to IPO. They’re burning cash at current pricing and if a true price war breaks out the only way that ends is if either OpenAI or Anthropic blows up and goes away.

Right now OpenAI is looking like the one setup to fail here. They have lost momentum big time and are looking incredibly vunerable.

dlcarrier• 1 month ago

LLMs are quickly becoming a commodity. In a decade, the only reason anyone won't be running free models locally will be for corporate oversight or regulatory needs, so the successful providers won't be the ones that make the best product, but the ones that make the most compliant product.

daft_pink• 1 month ago

OpenAI seems like such a better product these days. I was someone who jumped to anthropic early on for claude code, but I find myself jumping in the other direction these days.

I completely don’t understand Anthropic’s pricing where you have to pay a monthly fee to access their crappy models and pay per use for access to their top model. If you’re going to go pay per use it should be actually pay per use.

sireat• 1 month ago

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable.

I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan.

Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours.

I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not much reduction in the token allowance.

I generally write a detailed spec before plan then possibly iterate a bit before implementation. Not sure what I am doing "wrong".

SwellJoe2• 1 month ago

I literally never hit usage limits in Claude Code on the $100 plan, and I feel like I'm using it as heavily as I can while still producing useful software. I could certainly make thinky machine go burr by giving it more busy work, but it wouldn't be good code or code that needs to exist.

And, I even use `claude -p` pretty regularly for scripted stuff (automated security vulnerability searches), which I thought was now counted at regular API rates, but that doesn't seem to ever run out either. I do only run one at a time, though...not parallel, so maybe it doesn't kick over into some "automation" mode of counting usage, I dunno.

crystalPalace• 1 month ago

I agree, anecdotally I've only hit any usage limits on the $100 Max plan in the past couple of days using Fable 5. Evaluating old codebases eats a lot of tokens. But before Fable 5 I was running Opus 4.8 on max effort most of the day and rarely getting close to 50% usage. I rarely run dynamic workflows and sub-agents though.

ramraj07• 1 month ago

I regularly hit usage limits on CC but thats when im in the zone, and do 5 things in parallel. Thats like 5 hours a week.

I also hit limits if I do something important, at which point I make it do a loop with significant subagent counts to just review and adjust the code extensively using a bunch of frameworks. Im perfectly happy with the CC limits of a max plan, it is never something that blocks me.and when it runs out im brain fried as well anyway so thats not an issue.

ValentineC• 1 month ago

And, I even use `claude -p` pretty regularly for scripted stuff (automated security vulnerability searches), which I thought was now counted at regular API rates, but that doesn't seem to ever run out either.

The billing change starts 15 June:

https://zed.dev/blog/anthropic-subscription-changes

(Couldn't find a direct Claude link that wasn't a Twitter tweet (what is with AI platforms making announcements on that fElon-owned platform?!), so the Zed one seemed best.)

Sammi3• 1 month ago

I used 80% of my 5h anthropic usage window on a code review using fable. I tried this twice on two different feature implementations. Same result.

sigmar• 1 month ago

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable.

I imagine they track usage and can see whether their habitual users are switching to something else and aren't going to slash prices 'for the hell of it'.

just look at public stats on openrouter (obviously not indicative of first party app usage or direct api usage, but there's a huge difference between these graphs): https://openrouter.ai/openai https://openrouter.ai/anthropic

jonfw• 1 month ago

One token of GPT seems to go farther than an opus token in my experience, those books are a little cooked

emodendroket3• 1 month ago

It sounds like the problem is signing customers in the first place.

Sammi3• 1 month ago

Oh wow deepseek is on par in usage with anthropic: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek

Deepseek has been on a growth spurt recently. Openai is at half and looks almost flat in comparison to anthropic and deepseek.

DyslexicAtheist2• 1 month ago

Claude also just updated their privacy policy so they can shove a "please verify your identity" reply in your face after they flag your chat for "malicious activity". This is already common practice with Codex.

shostack• 1 month ago

And how does this compare to openai which is an ad company now? I am interested in trying codex but I want to know how my data will be used for ads or measurement and training data if I become a paid subscriber. And what happens to that data when I stop subscribing?

phil21• 1 month ago

Yeah, Codex basically gives me unlimited tokens for my use-case under the Pro plan. Just keep it the same price and keep or increase usage limits and I'm quite happy.

This lets me mess around with random experiments as I "catch up" on how to find various (mostly silly) uses for the technology.

That and much less worry about being banned without warning for not using approved harnesses as I try random stuff is a giant plus as well.

I assume they have lots of spare compute and less demand than Anthropic as it's obvious they are subsidizing my usage for now. But it lets me start off with "giant context window" type playgrounds which give immediate moderate effectiveness, then I can figure out how to tighten it up and reduce token burn from there.

timfsu• 1 month ago

In contrast, I’m on the $200 max plan for Codex and I hit the 5 hour limit near daily at work. I typically am having it work on about 5 tasks an hour. I’ve never hit a 5 hour limit on Claude on the $200 plan but I have hit my weekly limit.

AtlasBarfed• 1 month ago

Do you know the money these places are burning through?

IAmGraydon• 1 month ago

OAI is trying to lure Anthropic into a war they know Anthropic can’t fight - a war of who can burn more cash.

usernamed7• 1 month ago

Slashing prices is only going to go so far...you couldn't pay me to use chatGPT or codex. I used chatGPT for a long time but once i switched to anthropic i could sense a higher quality and a lot less frustration and correction on my part.

dennysora-main• 1 month ago

OpenAI is great for coding, but DeepSeek is also powerful and much cheaper.

I'm doing model training and architecture dev all day. often running loops to monitor training status or executing spec and E2E tests.

I really hope token costs come down.

It would be awesome if OpenAI could double the usage allowance for the Pro subscription.

OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

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