{"slug": "openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing", "title": "OpenAI vs. Anthropic: A price war over API tokens is brewing", "summary": "OpenAI is considering cutting API token prices to win customers from rival Anthropic, according to the Wall Street Journal. CEO Sam Altman said costs have become a major issue for businesses as usage-based billing drives up expenses for AI agents like Anthropic's viral coding tool Claude Code. A price war could deepen billions in losses at both companies, which have filed for IPOs.", "body_md": "# OpenAI vs. Anthropic: A price war over API tokens is brewing\n\n**OpenAI is weighing token price cuts to win customers from Anthropic, the Wall Street Journal reports.**\n\nThe company expects Anthropic to make similar moves. At a recent event, CEO Sam Altman said costs have become \"a huge issue\" for businesses.\n\nAnthropic's coding tool Claude Code recently went viral among developers, and the startup passed OpenAI in valuation for the first time. As AI agents get used more broadly in tools like these, usage costs have climbed, costs that were long covered by flat-rate subscriptions. Most providers have since shifted their enterprise pricing to usage-based billing. In practice, that means the same AI workload that used to cost $200 a month can quickly balloon to several thousand or even tens of thousands of dollars. In this [emerging token economy](https://the-decoder.com/frontier-radar-3-how-agentic-ai-is-turning-tokens-into-a-business-metric/), some enterprise customers are already pulling back on AI spending.\n\nA price war could deepen the already billions-deep losses at both companies. OpenAI confidentially [filed IPO paperwork](https://the-decoder.com/openai-says-going-public-is-a-complicated-set-of-tradeoffs-and-is-unsure-about-the-timing/) this week but likely [won't go public until 2027](https://the-decoder.com/openais-ipo-slips-as-altman-tells-staff-to-expect-a-public-offering-within-the-next-year/). Anthropic has also [filed its paperwork](https://the-decoder.com/claude-maker-anthropic-files-for-ipo-with-the-sec/) and plans to list later this year.\n\n```\nAI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans\n\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive \"AI Radar\" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe now\n```\n\n[WSJ](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-considers-drastic-price-cuts-anticipating-war-for-users-with-anthropic-9b8c178e)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing", "canonical_source": "https://the-decoder.com/openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing/", "published_at": "2026-06-11 15:28:50+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-11 18:21:53.757414+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Sam Altman", "Claude Code", "Wall Street Journal"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-vs-anthropic-a-price-war-over-api-tokens-is-brewing.jsonld"}}