OpenAI and Anthropic are cutting prices for some AI models as businesses seek cheaper alternatives from Chinese competitors such as Moonshot and DeepSeek. The shift matters because it challenges the US labs’ earlier focus on premium performance, while increasing pressure to show that heavy AI investment can produce returns ahead of planned public listings.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna’s prices by 80%, to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its Fable 5 model. Prices paid for leading US models have fallen by almost a quarter since mid-July, according to Silicon Data, and companies including DoorDash and Airbnb are testing Chinese models to reduce costs. Headline token prices are not a complete measure of value, however, as more capable models may use fewer tokens or attempts to complete a task.