AI Pricing War Escalates as OpenAI and Anthropic Slash Prices
The AI pricing war has escalated with OpenAI and Anthropic slashing prices on their mid-tier models. In July, OpenAI cut prices on GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%, bringing costs down to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. The company's higher-end GPT-5.6 Terra also got a haircut, dropping 20% to $2 input and $12 output per million tokens.
Anthropic followed suit on August 10, making the introductory pricing for Claude Sonnet 5 permanent at $2/$10 per million tokens. Then in September, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna at $2/$10 and $0.10/$0.50 respectively, roughly 50% lower than previous generation pricing.
Anthropic countered with Claude Opus 5.5 at $4/$20 list pricing, though built-in efficiency improvements deliver around 40% effective savings for users. Open source AI models are feeling the squeeze as enterprises increasingly split their workloads into tiers, reserving premium models for specialized tasks where performance differences matter.
Chinese AI companies have been setting aggressively low price benchmarks that make even the reduced US pricing look expensive. DeepSeek V4 Flash offers pricing as low as roughly $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens, undercutting American counterparts by a wide margin.