OpenAI and Anthropic slash model prices by up to 80% since June
OpenAI and Anthropic have cut AI model prices by as much as 80% since June, per AIVIO News, as open-weight rivals like DeepSeek press on cost.
OpenAI and Anthropic have spent the months since June cutting prices on their models, with some reductions reaching 80%, according to AIVIO News. Darlings, the sale is on.
The showstopper came July 30, when OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% to $0.20 per million input tokens, $1.20 per million output tokens and $0.02 per million cached tokens, per Max Woolf's analysis. A chart OpenAI published shows that without that cut, Luna would have lost on price to DeepSeek's open-weight V4 Pro.
September 22 brought two more. According to Woolf's analysis, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol at $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens and $0.20 per million cache-read tokens, half the input and output price of the discounted GPT-5.6 Sol. Anthropic announced Claude Opus 5.5 the same day at $4, $20 and $0.20 in that same order, a 40% to 60% total cost reduction from Opus 5.
The context: data from Vercel's AI model gateway shows cost per token at 43.3% of its April 2026 level, yet total spending keeps climbing because usage is growing faster than prices are falling.
My take? Woolf notes both companies are rumored to be heading for IPOs, Anthropic within a couple of months and OpenAI in 2027, while leaked financials show multi-billion dollar losses. A price war right before the roadshow is the most glamorous kind of discount there is. Customers win today. The balance sheets get their moment later.
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Cheaper per token is not cheaper per good answer. GPT-6 Sol was called a dud and replaced within a week, and users reported mixed real-world results on Anthropic's benchmark claims too.
Check the cache price. Cache reads are 96% to 99% of token spend when coding with agents, so GPT-6.1 Sol at $0.10 matters more than the headline input rate.
