OpenAI is weighing sharp cuts to what it charges for tokens, the per-unit pricing AI firms use to bill for model access, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The move is pre-emptive — OpenAI expects Anthropic to cut prices first and wants to avoid being undercut on the way into its IPO. The two labs are now competing head-to-head on price, valuation, and public-market timing.
OpenAI today sells ChatGPT in three consumer tiers: $8, $20, and $100-plus per month for access to its flagship GPT-5.5 models. Anthropic charges $17 per month for Claude Pro on an annual plan, and $100-plus for Claude Max. The overlap at the top of the stack is near-total, and the gap at the entry tier — $8 versus $17 — is one of the few real points of differentiation left between the two product lines.
The pricing review comes days after both companies filed confidentially for IPOs. OpenAI submitted its S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, on the heels of an earlier Anthropic filing. Neither company has disclosed a target share price or float size, but both filings have set off a scramble inside the labs to clean up margin structure and demonstrate pricing discipline before bankers start the roadshow.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI is weighing significant cuts to per-token pricing in anticipation of similar moves by Anthropic, the Wall Street Journal reported.
- 02OpenAI currently sells ChatGPT access in three tiers: $8, $20 and $100-plus per month for its flagship GPT-5.5 models.
- 03Anthropic charges $17 per month for Claude Pro on an annual plan and $100-plus for Claude Max.
- 04Anthropic closed its Series H on May 28 at a $965B valuation, edging OpenAI's $852B mark from March.
- 05ChatGPT hit 1 billion monthly app users in May, the fastest app ever to do so, per Sensor Tower.
Anthropic has the edge on paper. The company closed its Series H on May 28 at a $965 billion valuation, narrowly above the $852 billion mark OpenAI set in March. That is the first time in the modern AI cycle that Anthropic has topped OpenAI's private valuation, and it lands at the exact moment both companies are pitching public-market investors on the durability of their revenue.
Distribution is where OpenAI still leads. ChatGPT became the first app to reach 1 billion monthly app users in May, roughly three years after its November 2022 launch. Sensor Tower estimates that beats the previous record holder, Google Maps, which took about five years to hit the same milestone. A billion-user funnel is the asset OpenAI is now trying to monetize harder — and the constraint that makes price cuts dangerous, because every dollar shaved off the consumer tier multiplies across an enormous base.
The token-pricing logic is more straightforward on the developer side, where OpenAI and Anthropic compete directly for the same builders. Cursor, Replit, and a long list of coding-agent startups route traffic to whichever lab offers the better cost-per-quality ratio that week. A unilateral cut from Anthropic would force OpenAI to match within days or lose volume; OpenAI's preferred outcome is to move first and frame the cut as a strategic choice rather than a defensive one.
Sam Altman has spent the past week in Washington. Photos from June 3 show him meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Capitol Hill, part of an ongoing OpenAI push to shape the regulatory backdrop before its public listing. The IPO filing, the pricing review, and the DC outreach are running on a single timeline.
Anthropic has not signaled publicly that it intends to cut prices, and the WSJ report makes clear that OpenAI's plan is built on what it expects its rival to do, not on what Anthropic has actually announced. Anthropic could just as easily hold pricing and lean on its valuation lead as a signal of pricing power. OpenAI did not respond to CNBC's request for comment.
The risk for OpenAI is margin compression at exactly the wrong moment. Cutting token prices ahead of an IPO trades near-term revenue for share defense, and public-market investors tend to punish that trade when the cut isn't paired with a clear unit-economics story. If the cuts land and Anthropic doesn't follow, OpenAI gives up margin for nothing.
What this looks like, stepping back, is the first real price war between frontier labs. For three years the model providers competed on capability and got to charge whatever the benchmark gap justified. That era is closing. With Anthropic at $965B and OpenAI at $852B, both heading to public markets, and ChatGPT and Claude converging on the same use cases, the next leg of competition is going to be fought in dollars per million tokens — and the lab that figures out how to cut prices without bleeding margin wins the IPO narrative.
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