The AI price war is here, piling pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

The AI price war has begun. Big companies and startups, chafing at rapidly escalating artificial intelligence costs, are increasingly turning to tools that tap into cheaper AI models, including some from China.

- Bradley Olson & Tina Li

That’s raising pressure on industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic to lower their prices, a prospect that could hurt their ability to grow into profitable enterprises.

The new cost-saving tools help businesses save on AI costs by dynamically switching among a mixture of third-party AI models and in-house AI systems built using freely available, open-source models. The ecosystem allows autonomous systems, or agents, to use cheap models—including those made by Chinese companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek—for many functions. The agents only tap the most capable versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for more complex tasks.

That can reduce costs for some AI-assisted work by as much as 95%, according to executives using the tools.

‘‘Once we find something that is working well and engineers love, we find ways to make it cost effective,’’ said Dan Robinson, founder of Detail, a startup that identifies bugs. ‘‘There’s really an embarrassment of riches right now coming out of the open source labs.’’

Robinson shifted 90% of Detail’s workload from Claude and Google’s Gemini to custom models and GLM, a family of models developed in China.

The shift to cheaper models appears to have played a role in a recent decline in a widely followed index that tracks AI spending, Citadel Securities said in a report this week. ‘‘Even the most powerful technologies must pass through the prosaic discipline of cost curves, capacity constraints and marginal returns,’’ the report said.

OpenAI is considering drastic cuts to the prices it charges AI users, ahead of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The company sees itself as having an advantage in such a scenario because it spent massive sums in the past year to secure access to computing resources at far lower prices than what’s available now.