Sam Altman signals OpenAI price war as rivalry with Anthropic, China heats up

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signaled a price war by offering to cut the cost of its GPT-5.6 Sol model to one-quarter of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, as competition heats up with US rival Anthropic and cheaper Chinese AI alternatives. Altman's remarks come after Anthropic gained enterprise traction and Chinese developers drove down frontier model prices, putting pressure on OpenAI's pricing.

Sam Altman signals OpenAI price war as rivalry with Anthropic, China heats up American AI pioneer eyes 75 per cent fee cut for flagship software to counter market gains by Claude and low-cost alternatives from Chinese providers Minxiao Chang /author/minxiao-chang in Shenzhen OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman has signalled that the company was prepared to slash the price of its latest artificial intelligence models, as competition intensifies with US rival Anthropic and a growing wave of cheaper, rapidly advancing Chinese alternatives. In a social media post on Tuesday, Altman noted that OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5.6 Sol was already “half the price” of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, adding that OpenAI would be “happy to deliver at one-quarter of the price”. GPT-5.6 Sol https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3360118/chinese-users-praise-openais-gpt-56-efficiency-even-higher-cost-local-rivals?module=inline&pgtype=article last week, with pricing set at US$5 per million input tokens and US$30 per million output tokens. Fable 5, the consumer version of Anthropic’s powerful Mythos 5 model https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3356555/anthropic-opens-powerful-mythos-ai-model-public-some-safeguards?module=inline&pgtype=article , is priced at US$10 per million input tokens and US$50 per million output tokens. AI tokens serve as the fundamental units that models use to process and generate information, underpinning tasks ranging from chatbot conversations to image and film-quality video production. Altman’s remarks come after Anthropic gained recognition this year among global enterprise customers and software developers, with its Claude Code emerging as a popular AI coding tool. China has emerged as another source of pricing pressure after domestic AI developers spent much of this year driving down the cost of frontier models. While OpenAI lowered prices for its GPT-5.6 series compared with previous products, its flagship and mid-tier models remain more expensive than major rivals from China.