OpenAI Weighs Token Price Cuts as Anthropic Surges

OpenAI is discussing significant reductions to the prices it charges per token as part of internal talks aimed at responding to Anthropic’s rapid commercial growth. Company leaders have not finalized any pricing decision and discussions remain ongoing.

Anthropic’s revenue growth accelerated in 2025–2026. Its annualized run rate rose from roughly $1 billion at the start of 2025 to about $30 billion by April 2026. Anthropic’s coding product, Claude Code, reached $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of its public launch in May 2025 and surpassed $2.5 billion by February 2026. Business subscriptions to that product increased fourfold in the first quarter of 2026. Some analysts estimated Anthropic’s annualized revenue may have reached roughly $47 billion by May 2026.

OpenAI reported an approximately $13 billion revenue run rate in 2025 and projects it will not produce positive free cash flow before 2030. Anthropic projects it will generate more revenue than OpenAI by 2029 and plans to be free-cash-flow positive by 2028. Anthropic completed a large private funding round in February 2026 that valued the company at about $380 billion post-money. OpenAI has pursued separate financing discussions that could imply a valuation near $750 billion.

Lower token prices would reduce revenue per unit while potentially increasing usage. The economics of training and serving large language models are capital intensive: OpenAI leadership has acknowledged that the cost of training a single competitive model is approaching, and in some estimates exceeding, $1 billion. Changes in pricing can therefore affect margin math and the cost of providing services to enterprise customers.

Company officials say they are weighing trade-offs between protecting market share in enterprise contracts, particularly for coding tools, and preserving margins ahead of any public listing. Any pricing change will be monitored by customers and investors for its impact on contracts, competitive positioning in AI coding products, and the overall economics of operating large models.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the company’s recent pace of growth as “outstripping internal forecasts by a factor of eight.”