Leading US AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are lowering prices for their models to retain cost-conscious customers shifting to cheaper Chinese alternatives. The price cuts come amid rising AI costs, pushing companies to reduce usage and seek more affordable options. Chinese developers like Moonshot and DeepSeek are gaining traction with users from Silicon Valley to Europe. OpenAI recently reduced prices for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 percent, while Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its Fable 5 model. These moves have decreased customer costs for US models by nearly a quarter since mid-July, according to Silicon Data’s token price index. Tokens, the units of data processed by language models, are used to calculate many customers’ bills. The price cuts signal a shift for US AI firms that previously focused on performance over cost, as increasingly capable Chinese open models add pressure to lower prices. The changes also coincide with OpenAI and Anthropic planning initial public offerings at trillion-dollar valuations, as investors seek proof that heavy AI spending can yield returns. Corporate users face cost pressures as US labs move some enterprise customers from flat subscriptions to usage-based billing, where companies pay based on computational resources consumed. Some businesses have responded to rising bills by imposing AI usage caps or testing cheaper alternatives. Companies like DoorDash and Airbnb have started using Chinese-made models to cut costs. This shift has occurred alongside a surge in releases from Chinese labs that have narrowed the performance gap with US models, raising concerns in the US tech industry about potential customer losses despite heavy spending on maintaining technological advantages. AI labs offer a range of models with varying capabilities and prices, with costs differing based on the model version and effort settings used. Customers are typically charged for input tokens, which measure data fed into a model, and output tokens, which measure generated responses. The latest price cuts from US labs target mid-tier products, making them more competitive with Chinese offerings. OpenAI, for example, cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna from $1 to $0.20 per million input tokens and from $6 to $1.20 per million output tokens. Anthropic launched Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens—half the price of its Fable 5 model. This week, the company canceled a planned price increase for its Sonnet 5 model, which was set to take effect in September. Headline token prices do not provide a straightforward comparison between AI models, however. More capable models can sometimes complete a task using fewer tokens or with fewer attempts, meaning a model that appears more expensive based on the headline price of tokens can ultimately cost less. Additionally, most models can operate at different 'effort' settings, which vary the computing power used to answer a question and can affect both performance and the ultimate cost of completing a task. Artificial Analysis, which benchmarks models across areas including math, science, coding, and reasoning, found Anthropic’s Opus 5 at 'medium' effort delivered similar performance and cost per task to Moonshot’s Kimi K3 at 'max' effort. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna at 'max' effort performed similarly to DeepSeek’s V4 Flash at 'max,' but cost just under twice as much per task. Anthropic and OpenAI declined to comment. A person close to Anthropic said Opus 5’s pricing below its flagship Fable 5 was how the startup’s 'family of models is built, so there’s no connection to competitors.' Mantas Lukauskas, AI tech lead at Hostinger, a website hosting provider that has used large language models since 2020, noted that prices for the very best models were 'flat to rising.' He added that the recent pricing changes are the 'first real test' of whether groups such as Anthropic and OpenAI can protect the cost of their most advanced offerings: 'The US labs have cut the middle and are defending the top.'
Source: arstechnica
