ChatGPT price-war report comes as data shows AI usage already tailing off

By Jules Rimmer

WSJ reports that OpenAI may slash prices of its AI services

As competition with Anthropic heats up, and customers balk at the cost of using its products, OpenAI is reportedly considering whether to slash the fees charged for its AI tokens.

A report in the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday said OpenAI's chief executive officer Sam Altman is urgently exploring options to lure corporate customers away from its main competitor Anthropic. The obvious strategy is to make its services cheaper. AI service providers use tokens as a unit of measurement when they bill corporates for their products, and in recent weeks there have been signs of a growing discomfort among users at the high cost.

Microsoft began cancelling some of its Claude licenses from Anthropic, Amazon (AMZN) removed its AI leaderboard as concerns mounted that employees were 'tokenmaxxing' (using them performatively) and Uber's chief operating officer also questioned the value of its AI expenditure.

Under pressure to raise funding and meet targets for its public listing later this year, Altman has acknowledged that the rising cost of its AI product suite was becoming a "huge issue." Competition from rival Anthropic, whose Claude coding tool has been immensely successful since its launch in 2025, is intense.

These anxieties have been reflected in the benchmark pricing of tokens. The Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index, which peaked at around $2.05 at the end of May, has since plummeted more than 10% to $1.80. To put this move into context, as recently as last December the index was trading at $1.01. The data provider, Silicon Data, says its index "captures the marginal willingness to pay for LLM models."

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed for flotations in 2026, and so are going after many of the same investors for equity capital. An internecine price war that shrinks margins is extremely damaging in the run-up to an IPO.

Some analysts have been forecasting this for a while. A recent research note published by Citadel Securities macro strategist Frank Flight described "multiple reports of unexpectedly large token bills." He warned "these frontier models would be expensive to run, constrained by physical bottlenecks and vulnerable to unrealistic expectations of frictionless deployment cost."

Flight argues that, no matter how powerful the technology of frontier models, "cost curves, capacity constraints and marginal returns" are what will determine the pace and scale of adoption. For the overall economy, Flight maintains, large, simpler models may be more "cost-effective and productivity-augmenting," so he predicts a "bifurcation" between everyday AI usage and frontier models.

The competition between Anthropic and OpenAI has also been extended to their respective valuations. At their latest funding rounds, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May, while OpenAI's was $852 billion in March.

U.S. stock-market futures (ES00) (NQ00) were pointing to gains on Thursday after a run of losses in the tech sector, with the Nasdaq Composite COMP falling in five of the last six sessions.

-Jules Rimmer

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06-11-26 0653ET