OpenAI, Anthropic Cutting Token Prices? This War Could Dent Profits Just As Both Head For IPOs

At a time of surging demand for AI, the potential plan to lower prices is a problematic signal from the companies, experts say.

• OpenAI is mulling drastically reducing prices in anticipation of a similar move from Anthropic.
• Both companies have confidentially filed for initial public offerings, although a new report says OpenAI’s IPO has been pushed back.
• Stocktwits sentiment was ‘bullish’ for OpenAI and Anthropic on Wednesday.

OpenAI is reportedly considering reducing the price it charges to win customers from rival Anthropic, in response to the company’s expectation of similar reductions by the Claude operator, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed sources.

OpenAI and Anthropic are racing toward stock market listings and have recently submitted confidential filings to regulators, although OpenAI’s IPO timeline now appears to have shifted to a later date. 

According to a report by The Information, CEO Sam Altman told employees earlier this week that he expects the AI startup to go public “within the next year,” suggesting a timeline later than the October debut that many had previously anticipated.

OpenAI Plays Catchup

Now, OpenAI is weighing significant cuts to its token pricing, the unit of measurement that artificial-intelligence firms use to bill for their products, according to the Journal’s report. The move would be in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic, it added.

Price cuts could potentially erode the profit margins at both companies, which already lose billions of dollars. The discussions come as OpenAI appears to have lost its lead to Anthropic and plans an effort to catch up. 

In April, Anthropic said it tripled its annual revenue run rate to $30 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s ARR of about $24 billion. After the latest funding rounds, Anthropic was valued at $947.18 compared to OpenAI’s private market valuation of $832.76B, according to data from Nasdaq Private Market.

Politicos, Hedge Fund Managers React To AI Cost Concerns

“Businesses are increasingly concluding that the value of the AI model is not worth the extravagant costs," said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who famously ran on a Republican ticket during the 2024 presidential election. "It's just an observation confirming what business people have told me — that they are balking at the high price of AI tokens."

Hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, who shot to fame after predicting Enron's collapse, said the speculated price cuts appear problematic. “Price cuts anywhere in the AI ecosystem when demand for ‘compute’ is supposedly infinite, seems… problematic,” he wrote on X.

“Is gravity about to re-emerge for LLM token prices?” questioned Gordon Johnson, an equity researcher and founder of GLJ Research. On X, he reshared a chart of the Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index, which showed a dip in the current month.

AI pricing is increasingly becoming a central point of debate in the industry. In a new note titled "Tokenomics," Citadel Securities argued that even the most powerful frontier technology still has to pass through the boring discipline of cost curves, capacity limits, and marginal returns.

“Adoption is no longer about what AI can do in principle. It's becoming about the price and scarcity of the inputs needed to run it at scale. Compute. Power. Cooling. Memory bandwidth. Inference budgets. All real, all binding constraints,” according to the hedge fund’s report, reshared on X by “Big Short” investor Michael Burry.

Retail Sentiment For OpenAI, Anthropic

The news was also picked up for discussion by traders on Stocktwits, although retail sentiment for both OPEAZZX and ANTHZZX remained ‘bullish.’  

Earlier this week, Anthropic released Mythos-class models. Fable 5 — its first Mythos-class model for general use — is double the price of the AI lab's Opus models, making it the most expensive release yet.

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