Something deep has changed in the AI arms race. For three years, leading companies competed over abstract titles like “the smartest model”, “the most creative one” or the system capable of solving the most complex physics equations.
But according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the real battlefield is now moving from the labs to customers’ profit and loss statements, for both enterprise and private users. The report says OpenAI is weighing an aggressive price reduction aimed at slowing the rapid rise of its rival Anthropic.
2 View gallery
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
(Photo: Reuters, Getty Images)
Growing frustration
The background to this shift includes growing frustration in the business sector over inflated bills from tech companies, especially AI providers. The industry term that has gained popularity in recent months is “tokenmaxing”, referring to the maximization of token pricing, units used to measure data volume and billing in AI systems. The term describes a situation in which organizations consume massive amounts of computing resources and tokens without always seeing a clear return on investment.
Across the world, companies have begun voicing open frustration with the trend. Tech giants like Uber have even admitted that their annual budgets for AI-based code development were fully exhausted as early as April. Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has acknowledged in closed discussions that computing costs have become a major problem for users and that the company must find ways to deliver more value for less money.
However, the real pressure on the maker of ChatGPT does not come only from customer complaints, but mainly from the existential threat posed by Anthropic. The younger company, founded by former OpenAI employees, has seen phenomenal success over the past year and a half thanks to its dedicated coding tool Claude Code, and more recently the launch of its new model Fable 5.
These tools have gone viral among software engineers, pushing Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate to unprecedented levels that are rapidly closing the gap with OpenAI. In several private funding rounds, Anthropic’s estimated valuation even surpassed OpenAI for the first time, prompting OpenAI to shift its strategic focus toward accelerating its competing coding tool Codex.
A major financial paradox
The planned price cuts for tokens create a major financial paradox. Both companies are now on a direct path toward massive IPOs on Wall Street, and deliberately compressing profit margins just before going public is seen as a bold, if not risky, strategy.
OpenAI is burning cash at a rate 14 times higher than Anthropic, and current forecasts do not expect it to reach profitability or positive cash flow before 2030. Starting a price war at this stage could deepen losses for both companies, which together already spend tens of billions of dollars a year on maintaining server farms and purchasing advanced chips.
Historically and technologically, this price war marks the stage where a premium, highly desired product turns into a commodity measured by price rather than uniqueness. A similar process occurred in cloud computing, when Amazon, Microsoft and Google engaged in brutal pricing wars over storage and processing costs until the market stabilized.
As the quality gap between different models narrows and switching between systems becomes easier and almost effortless, companies are realizing that market dominance will no longer be defined by intelligence alone, but by the ability to deliver it at the lowest price.
The biggest winner, at least in the short term, will be the industry as a whole, which will benefit from far cheaper artificial intelligence. But for investors navigating the upcoming IPOs, it is a high-stakes and nerve-wracking bet.