Price War: OpenAI Wins Back Business Customers From Anthropic
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The A.I. price war is having an effect, and it is favoring OpenAI: Among companies that buy A.I. models through the OpenRouter platform, OpenAI has all but closed its gap with Anthropic within a year. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the two rivals split spending almost evenly in September among roughly 120,000 companies that use products from both. At the start of the year, Anthropic accounted for about three-quarters of it.
Cheaper Models as Leverage
OpenRouter routes requests for A.I. models to different providers based on price and performance, and Stripe bought the platform this summer for $7.5 billion. Its data therefore shows fairly directly where companies actually spend their money. According to The Journal, the price war was fueled mainly by OpenAI’s low-cost GPT-5.6 lineup: OpenAI cut the price of its smallest version, Luna, by 80 percent and of the midsize model, Terra, by 20 percent.
For many companies, price is becoming the deciding factor, because A.I. spending grows quickly as more employees and A.I. agents use the tools. Rather than relying only on the most powerful model, they combine several providers and use cheaper models for simple tasks such as summaries. The software company Retool, for example, says it spends about 20 percent less on OpenAI models than on comparable Anthropic models. “The honeymoon phase of sticking with only one model provider is over,” one corporate customer told The Journal.
Bottlenecks and a Data Debate at Anthropic
Anthropic is also dealing with problems of its own making. Strong demand for Claude Code led to capacity shortages and outages. On top of that came criticism of a 30-day retention of user data for safety reasons, which Anthropic introduced with a model launched in June. Customers handling sensitive data pushed back, and Anthropic then gave some companies more control over the stored data. Cheap Chinese open-weight models are adding to the price pressure as well.
In the spring, OpenAI sharpened its focus on businesses and productivity and shut down side projects such as the video app Sora. “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Fidji Simo, then OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, told staff, according to The Journal.
Anthropic Counters With Price Cuts
The lead is not entirely gone. According to data from the financial services company Ramp, OpenAI’s spending briefly overtook Anthropic’s in mid-September, but Anthropic was narrowly back in front by the following weekend. Anthropic is also responding with price cuts of its own: Its new small model, Claude Haiku 5.5, costs only a tenth of its predecessor for most requests and matches OpenAI’s small model on price.
The figures have their limits. OpenRouter’s customers are mostly A.I. start-ups and tech companies, so the data does not give a complete picture of the enterprise market. Still, a lot is at stake for both companies: Anthropic is reportedly preparing an I.P.O. for November, and OpenAI is aiming for next year. Both will need to show sustainable revenue to justify valuations of more than $1 trillion (about €890 billion).
