OpenAI is considering major price cuts for AI tokens, the central unit for gauging AI costs, to compete with Anthropic, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The company expects Anthropic to lower prices as well and is exploring reductions to attract customers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged that costs are “a huge issue,” adding: “I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend.”
The Journal suggested that lower prices could further pressure profitability, as both companies already spend billions on the computing power required to run AI models.
Anthropic has gained momentum after the success of Claude Code among software engineers, boosting revenue and helping the startup surpass OpenAI’s valuation.
In response, OpenAI has made Codex a strategic priority.
Some large customers are also reassessing AI spending. Earlier this year, an Uber executive said the company had exhausted its 2026 budget for agentic AI, while another executive questioned whether AI coding gains were translating into customer-facing improvements.
These concerns have fueled debate in Silicon Valley over “tokenmaxxing,” maximizing token usage to boost productivity even when returns are unclear.
While OpenAI and Anthropic dominate revenue from new AI products, investors have long viewed the similarity of their offerings and the ease of customer switching as a key risk.
OpenAI confidentially filed for an Initial Public Offering this week, following Anthropic. In a recent message, Altman said the company plans to go public “within the next year.”
OpenAI also said that there were “things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” but provided no further details.
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