OpenAI Is Slashing Prices to Steal Anthropic's Biggest Customers

The frontier-model contest has shifted from who is smartest to who is cheapest. According to The Information, OpenAI is pulling Anthropic's enterprise customers across with steep discounts -- and the numbers the customers' own executives have given publicly suggest the strategy is working.

The numbers from three customers

Start with developer platform Replit: OpenAI offered more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year, and Replit then moved most of its AI spending from Anthropic to OpenAI. Replit CEO Amjad Masad said onstage in San Francisco on October 16 that the company was no longer working with Anthropic, citing cost, partnership and OpenAI's benchmark wins; he later clarified that Replit remains model-agnostic and users can still choose Claude, but OpenAI is now the preferred partner for Replit Agent.

HR software maker Rippling flipped further: CEO Parker Conrad said Anthropic models handled 57 percent of the company's coding work in May, against 16 percent for OpenAI; today OpenAI is at 52 percent and Anthropic at 18 percent. Online learning platform DataCamp's CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI's pricing cut his company's AI costs by 80 to 90 percent. A US bank with more than $7 billion in assets reportedly had its ChatGPT seats doubled to 500 employees at no extra charge, paying under $7 per user instead of the usual $20 or more.

The logic behind the price war

The discounts are partly OpenAI buying market share at the expense of its own margins, but they also rest on real cost reductions: the report points to OpenAI's newer Sol and Luna model lines, which are more efficient and cheaper to run. Meanwhile Anthropic's growth slowed from the second quarter to the third, according to an investor memo, and both labs face price pressure from lower-cost Chinese models by DeepSeek and Kimi.

Two lines must be kept clear. First, the up-to-90-percent figure is one customer's cost reduction, not a published OpenAI price list. Second, the deal terms so far rest on customer executives and people familiar with the deals; neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has confirmed them. Anthropic is reportedly weeks from a listing -- the worst possible moment for its biggest logos to be quoted explaining how much cheaper the competition got.