OpenAI is thinking about slashing what it charges for its AI, and it's not because the tech suddenly got cheaper.
According to a WSJ scoop this week, OpenAI is weighing drastic price cuts on the tokens it sells to developers and businesses. The talks are still in flux, but the reasoning is straightforward: Anthropic is expected to make similar moves soon, and OpenAI doesn't want to lose customers over a few cents per million tokens.
At a recent company event, CEO Sam Altman admitted that AI costs had become "a huge issue" for customers. He said it's almost become a "meme" for companies to blow their entire annual AI budget by the first quarter and then come asking him how to make things more efficient. "I think we'll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend," Altman said.
Uber is the kind of customer he's talking about. The company rolled out Claude Code to all 5,000 of its engineers in December, and by March, 84% of them were on it, with individual engineers burning $500 to $2,000 a month each. Uber's CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information he was "back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already."
And here's the part that should make every CFO sit up. A recent analysis from SemiAnalysis found that the big AI labs are heavily subsidizing their power users. The firm bought every subscription tier from both companies, stress-tested them to the limit, and found that a $200-a-month Claude Max plan was delivering around $8,000 worth of tokens at API rates. OpenAI's subsidies were even steeper, running close to twice Anthropic's. In other words, the companies bleeding cash to keep you on the platform are bleeding worse than anyone realized.
JPMorgan analyst Mark Schilsky said the quiet part out loud in a note last week: investors are now openly asking how much of corporate America's AI spending is just being wasted, and how much is being propped up by the labs themselves.
That's the awkward setup for these price cuts. As we wrote on June 10, Anthropic has quietly built itself into a roughly $4.7 billion ARR business, with about 80% of that coming from enterprise and roughly half the capital burn of OpenAI. So OpenAI is being asked to cut consumer token prices, which are already losing money, to defend the one front where it still leads. And it's doing all of this in the same week it confidentially filed for an IPO, with Altman telling employees the company plans to go public within the next year. Public investors usually prefer the chart where margins go up.
INTO THE VALLEY
The funny thing about subsidy wars is that someone always pays in the end. Right now it's the labs eating the difference so developers stay hooked, but as Replit CEO Amjad Masad put it on X, "the rug pull is coming, sooner or later." If you're a business that built your next two years of planning around current token economics, enjoy the discounts while they last. The companies losing money to keep you on the platform are not going to lose money on you forever.
