OpenAI, Anthropic Cut Prices as Chinese AI Rivals Advance

Chinese developers DeepSeek, Z.ai and Moonshot are narrowing the performance gap with U.S. frontier systems while charging far less and offering open-weight models. Businesses are increasingly routing tasks among suppliers to contain surging AI bills, threatening the premium pricing and enterprise share of OpenAI and Anthropic. The pressure also tests valuations of about $852 billion for OpenAI and $965 billion for Anthropic as investors seek evidence that costly model development can produce durable margins.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30 at introductory rates of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through Aug. 31, then launched Opus 5 on July 24 at $5 and $25, respectively, with near-Fable performance. OpenAI responded on July 30 by cutting GPT-5.6 Luna prices 80% to $0.20 for input and $1.20 for output, while reducing Terra prices 20% to $2 and $12, intensifying competition with lower-cost Chinese models.