OpenAI and Anthropic built their businesses around a simple proposition: the best AI costs more. Cheaper Chinese competitors are now testing how long that premium can hold.

The pressure has intensified as companies confront rising AI bills and shift from flat subscriptions to usage-based charges. Some customers have capped usage or begun trialling lower-cost alternatives, while DoorDash and Airbnb have turned to Chinese-made models to rein in spending. Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek have benefited as their open models—downloadable and adaptable by developers—close the gap with leading US systems.¹

The response from the US labs has come in prices, not surrender. OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna from $1 to $0.20 per million input tokens and from $6 to $1.20 per million output tokens—an 80% reduction. Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5 at half the input and output token price of its flagship Fable 5, then cancelled a planned September increase for Sonnet 5. Silicon Data’s token-price index found that customers’ prices for leading US models had fallen by nearly a quarter since mid-July.¹

Yet the apparent price war has limits. Headline token rates do not settle the value question: a stronger model can finish work with fewer tokens, fewer attempts and less total cost. Artificial Analysis found Opus 5 at medium effort roughly matched Moonshot’s Kimi K3 at maximum effort on both performance and cost per task; OpenAI’s Luna, at maximum effort, performed similarly to DeepSeek V4 Flash but cost just under twice as much per task.¹

Anthropic’s camp insists its new pricing is about product design rather than a Chinese challenge, saying its model family is structured that way. But Mantas Lukauskas, AI tech lead at Hostinger, framed the stakes more bluntly: prices for the very best models remain “flat to rising,” and “The US labs have cut the middle and are defending the top.”¹

That is the fault line for two companies pursuing IPOs at trillion-dollar valuations: discount enough to keep customers, but not so much that their frontier advantage stops looking scarce.