OpenAI Prepares AI Price War, Anthropic as Main Opponent

JAKARTA - OpenAI is considering a major cut in the price of AI tokens to face competition with Anthropic. The cost of using AI is now one of the main battlefields of the two major companies.

Anadolu Agency, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported on Thursday, June 11, that OpenAI is exploring a reduction in the price of AI tokens. Tokens are units of text or data processed by AI models and used to calculate the cost of artificial intelligence services.

The move comes as OpenAI expects Anthropic to also lower prices. Competition is no longer just about the smartest model, but also who can provide cheaper services to customers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the cost was a "big problem".

"I think we're going to have a lot of ways to help people get more value at a lower cost," Altman said.

According to the report, the price cuts also risk squeezing the profitability of AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic have already spent billions of dollars on computing power.

Computing power is the capacity of large computers used to run and train AI models. It is expensive because it requires chips, data centers, electricity, and large infrastructure.

Anthropic has recently gained momentum from Claude Code, an AI product to help the work of software engineers. The increase in revenue makes the company's valuation said to exceed OpenAI.

OpenAI responded by making Codex a strategic priority. Codex is an OpenAI AI product aimed at helping the writing and development of software code.

A number of large customers are also beginning to recalculate AI spending. An Uber executive previously said the company had spent 2026 on agency AI. The term refers to an AI system that can carry out tasks more independently, rather than just answering commands.

Other executives questioned whether the productivity gains from AI coding actually resulted in improvements that customers felt.

The concern has sparked a debate in Silicon Valley about "tokenmaxxing", the habit of maximizing the use of AI tokens to pursue productivity, even though the business results are not always clear.

Although OpenAI and Anthropic dominate revenue from new AI products, investors see a big risk: the services of the two are similar, and customers are relatively easy to move from one provider to another.

OpenAI is also reportedly in the process of filing a confidential initial public offering (IPO) this week, following Anthropic. In a recent message, Altman said OpenAI plans to list on the exchange "in the next year".

OpenAI said there were "things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company", but did not provide further details.