Fortune Tech: Pace the profits

Fortune’s new “Change the World” list is out, and tech companies are all over it again. Anthropic, BYD, Canva, Cloudflare, Coursera, Medtronic and WeRide made the cut, alongside bigger names like Alibaba, Alphabet and Samsung. The message behind the list hasn’t changed much since Fortune started it in 2015: make money, yes, but also help fix something real.

The bigger tech story this morning is less noble and more competitive. OpenAI and Anthropic each rolled out cheaper versions of their frontier models within hours of each other on Tuesday, a pretty clear sign that the race between the two labs is now about price as much as performance. Both companies have recently talked up the need to slow AI down. Their pricing teams did not get the memo.

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5, saying it matches the company’s flagship Fable 5.1 while costing about 40% less to run than Opus 5, which arrived in July. It’s also the first model in a new family, with Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 due over the coming weeks. OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, both spin-offs of GPT-6 Astra, which came out earlier this month.

OpenAI also cut API prices by 50%, undercutting the pricing on a promotion it is already running for GPT-5.6, Astra’s predecessor. That means the fight is now happening on two fronts: cheaper models for businesses that want to spend less, and lower prices on the most expensive systems. Ara Kharazian of Ramp said that is how technology markets usually work, but he warned that AI boosters may be assuming these models will stay premium forever. The market may have other ideas.