OpenAI is considering sweeping cuts to what it charges for AI tokens, and the timing is not subtle. The company expects Anthropic to move first, and it wants to be ready.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (June 11) that the discussions are still in flux, citing people familiar with the matter. But CEO Sam Altman has already been signaling the direction publicly. At a recent event, he acknowledged that AI costs have become “a huge issue” for business customers. “I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend,” he said.
The problem with that promise is that both companies are already losing billions of dollars. The computing costs required to run AI systems at scale are enormous, and cutting token prices would compress margins further right as both OpenAI and Anthropic are pursuing IPOs that will put their economics in front of public investors for the first time. OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO earlier this week. In a recent message to employees, Altman said the company plans to go public within the next year.
The competitive pressure driving the price discussion is real. Anthropic’s revenue surged after its coding tool Claude Code caught fire among software engineers, and the startup briefly overtook OpenAI’s valuation. OpenAI has since made its own coding tool, Codex, a company priority.
But enterprise enthusiasm for AI has started running into budget ceilings. An Uber executive said earlier this year the company had exhausted its 2026 spending on agentic AI. Another executive said last month that it was hard to connect AI-driven coding gains to actual product improvements customers could see. Those admissions have sparked a broader debate in Silicon Valley about “tokenmaxxing,” which is burning through tokens at high volume without a clear return on the spend.
That backdrop is what makes a price war both logical and risky. The two companies have captured most of the revenue flowing into new AI products, but investors have long pointed to one structural vulnerability: customers can switch between them easily. A price war tests that weakness directly, and whoever blinks first sets the floor for an industry that has not yet figured out how to grow profitably.
