Price War: OpenAI Wins Back Business Customers From Anthropic

The A.I. price war is no longer theoretical. Among companies buying models through OpenRouter, OpenAI has nearly caught Anthropic after spending was split almost evenly in September across roughly 120,000 companies that use products from both. At the start of the year, Anthropic had about three-quarters of that spend.

OpenRouter sits in a useful spot here: it sends requests to different model providers based on price and performance, and Stripe bought the platform this summer for $7.5 billion. That makes its data a fairly direct view into where companies are putting money. The big driver, according to The Wall Street Journal, has been OpenAI’s low-cost GPT-5.6 lineup. OpenAI cut the price of its smallest model, Luna, by 80 percent, and the midsize Terra by 20 percent.

And businesses are clearly paying attention. As more employees and A.I. agents use these tools, costs pile up fast, so teams are mixing providers instead of pledging loyalty to one. Cheap models handle the routine work, like summaries, while the pricier ones get reserved for harder jobs. The software company Retool says it spends about 20 percent less on OpenAI models than on comparable Anthropic models. One corporate customer told The Journal that the era of sticking with one provider is over.

Anthropic is fighting back, but it has also run into problems of its own. Strong demand for Claude Code led to capacity shortages and outages. Then came pushback over a 30-day user-data retention policy for safety reasons on a model launched in June. Anthropic later gave some companies more control over stored data.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has been sharpening its focus on business customers. In the spring, it narrowed in on productivity and dropped side projects such as the video app Sora. Fidji Simo, then OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, told staff they could not miss the moment by getting distracted by side quests. Now Anthropic has answered with price cuts too: its new small model, Claude Haiku 5.5, costs only a tenth of its predecessor for most requests and matches OpenAI’s small model on price. The fight is still tight, but the direction is obvious: business buyers are getting cheaper, and the model makers are getting less romantic.