The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic has moved firmly into a place every business understands: price.
According to a report from The Information, summarised by The Decoder, OpenAI has been offering aggressive discounts to win business from Anthropic, and some big names are shifting their AI spending.
Rippling is one example. CEO Parker Conrad said the company raised OpenAI’s share of its coding workload from 16% to 52%, while Anthropic’s share dropped from 57% to 18%. Skimwire, citing the same report, says those figures compare May with today, and that Rippling’s motivation was cutting costs.
Replit reportedly switched after OpenAI offered more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year, and after Anthropic ended a discount it had been giving the company. Replit says its users can still pick Claude, but OpenAI is now the default. DataCamp was reportedly offered a 40% discount on the condition that it use OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, and DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI’s pricing cut his costs by 80% to 90%. That’s where the eye-catching ‘90%’ headlines come from, though it’s worth being precise: that figure is the CEO’s estimate of his overall savings, not a published discount rate.
The report also describes a US bank with more than $7 billion in assets that got its ChatGPT seats doubled to 500 employees at no extra charge, paying under $7 per user instead of the usual $20 or more.
Not all of this is OpenAI simply burning margin. The Decoder notes that the company has also achieved real price cuts through its Sol and Luna model lines, thanks to more efficient models and infrastructure. Meanwhile, an investor memo cited in the report says Anthropic’s growth slowed from the second to the third quarter.
And both companies are feeling pressure from China, where models from DeepSeek and Kimi offer comparable performance at a fraction of the cost.
Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has publicly commented on the figures, according to Skimwire. The timing is notable, though: AI coding tools are among the biggest buyers of AI models, and they have been a core part of Anthropic’s business.
Why it matters
For businesses buying AI, a price war is good news. If you’re spending serious money on AI tools or APIs, this is the moment to ask your provider for better terms, and to keep your setup flexible enough to switch models without rebuilding everything. For us as a development team, it’s a reminder to design AI features so the model behind them can be swapped. Today’s best deal may not be tomorrow’s.
Sources: The Decoder, Skimwire. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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