OpenAI is weighing steep cuts to its token pricing to win customers from rival Anthropic, whose run rate has surged to $30 billion ahead of both firms' planned IPOs.
Key Points:
- OpenAI is considering sharp reductions to token pricing to pull enterprise customers back from Anthropic.
- Anthropic's revenue run rate has climbed to about $30 billion, outrunning OpenAI's pace.
- The pricing fight lands as both companies move toward public listings, stirring fresh margin worries.
OpenAI Weighs Token Price Cuts
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 10 that the company is weighing sharp reductions to the prices it charges for tokens, the central unit used to gauge AI costs. Those talks remain fluid for now. Even so, the signal is clear, with OpenAI ready to use price as a lever against a rival it once led by a comfortable margin.
OpenAI has trailed Anthropic in the enterprise race for much of the year, after its rival's coding tools caught on with developers and reshaped how firms budget for AI. A drawn-out price war would squeeze margins on both sides, which already lose billions on compute.
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Anthropic Revenue Outpaces OpenAI
Anthropic's climb has been hard to overstate. Its annualized run rate sat near $1 billion at the start of 2025 and reached $30 billion by April 2026, a pace CEO Dario Amodei said beat internal forecasts eightfold.
That milestone took under three years from the company's first dollar of revenue, a mark Salesforce needed roughly two decades of growth to reach.
Claude Code, its AI coding agent, crossed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue by February, with business subscriptions to the tool quadrupling in the first quarter and enterprise clients now supplying over half of that total. OpenAI, by comparison, logged a run rate above $20 billion for 2025 and still does not expect positive free cash flow until 2030.
Price War Meets IPO Timing
Both companies are widely expected to go public soon. Anthropic closed its Series G in February at a $380 billion valuation, while OpenAI's March round raised $122 billion and valued it near $852 billion.
Anthropic was also reportedly weighing a fresh round above $900 billion by May, a mark that would edge past its older competitor in private markets.
Lower prices are not a free lever. The volume argument works only where demand is elastic and costs stay low, and frontier AI is neither, with a single frontier model now costing close to $1 billion to train.
OpenAI has tried this before. When it launched GPT-5 in August 2025, it undercut Anthropic's Claude rates by a wide margin, drawing quick praise from developers at the time. The move was an early sign the firm would lean on cost to defend a lead it can no longer take for granted.
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