The Wall Street Journal report on June 10 that OpenAI is testing a significant drop in the price it pays for tokens.
The talks are said to be ongoing, but this shows that OpenAI sees Anthropic closing the gap and is considering using the tree as a tool.
Numbers That Cause Stress
Anthropic history annualized running cost it stood at about $1 billion at the beginning of 2025. By April 2026, this number reached $30 billion, a process that CEO Dario Amodei explained exceeded the company’s forecasts by eight percent.
Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI assistant, bought $1 billion in annual revenue within six months of its launch in May 2025 and exceed $2.5 billion by February 2026.
Business subscriptions to the Claude Code quadruple in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Some analysts now estimate that Anthropic’s annual revenue could pass $47 billion by May 2026.
OpenAI, in comparison, said a selling price approximately $13 billion in 2025 and is not expected to turn a profit or generate good free cash flow until 2030.
This difference in growth rate, not in current income, is what makes the Anthropic increase threatening enough to trigger a price response.
IPO Paradox
All of them OpenAI and Anthropic it sounds like they are looking at lists of people. OpenAI has been in talks for an investment that could cost the company $750 billion. Anthropic closed a Series G of $30 billion in February 2026 at a price of $380 billion after financing.
Deliberately cutting the price of your original product before it goes live is a decision that many would consider detrimental to its IPO goals.
The opposite is that low prices drive money supply, which drives money. That idea resides in markets where demand is stable and where the company’s value is sustainable.
AI architecture is no more. Training and using frontier models is expensive on a scale that most industries do not experience. The OpenAI leadership you havehe agreedthat the cost of training a single competitive race is approaching, and in some estimates, exceeding $1 billion.
Cutting the prices of tokens in those places is not just about making a big profit. It would also mean a large loss, spread over a larger customer base.
A note OpenAI’s Price War With Anthropic May Derail Its IPO appeared for the first time BeInCrypto.
