OpenAI and Anthropic are heading toward the public markets with trillion-dollar ambitions, but their fight for enterprise customers is now shifting to price.
OpenAI is weighing steep cuts to what it charges developers for AI tokens, according to a Wall Street Journal report, as it prepares for a possible pricing battle with Anthropic.
The discussions are not final, but the timing looks intresting.
Anthropic, once seen as the smaller challenger, is now valued at $965 billion, ahead of OpenAI’s latest $852 billion valuation.
OpenAI vs Anthropic: The token war begins
Tokens are the small units of text that AI companies use to measure usage and charge customers for model access.
That pricing system has become one of the most important battlegrounds in enterprise AI.
OpenAI’s public pricing page lists GPT-5.5 at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, making heavy use expensive for companies running large coding, customer-service, or agentic AI workloads.
The problem is that many companies are now asking whether the bill is justified.
Business Insider reported this week that several large companies have started rationing AI usage, setting internal caps and demanding clearer proof of return on investment.
Uber was among the companies cited as having hit limits on agentic AI spending, while others are pushing employees to use cheaper models or justify expensive usage.
A JPMorgan note cited by ZeroHedge said investors have been discussing whether much of the token spending by corporate America is being “wasted,” adding that anecdotes from companies such as Uber were not helping the narrative.
The pressure is especially clear in coding tools, where AI agents can burn through huge token volumes.
Forrester analyst Ken Parmelee, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, described coding assistants as the new consumption engine for AI platforms.
“Anytime you ask any of these tools, ‘Build this thing for me,’ they’re burning tokens. This is the new gateway drug.”
Anthropic’s momentum, OpenAI’s dilemma
The pricing pressure comes as Anthropic has gained serious momentum in enterprise AI.
The company said in April that its annualised revenue had surpassed $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025.
Claude Code, its AI coding tool, has become a major driver of that growth, particularly among software developers and enterprise engineering teams.
OpenAI still has enormous scale, including ChatGPT’s consumer reach and a deep enterprise base.
The company is generating about $2 billion in monthly revenue, equal to roughly $24 billion on an annualised basis.
But Anthropic’s rapid rise has rewritten the script: OpenAI is no longer the only company setting the pace, and investors are now asking whether Anthropic has built the stronger enterprise play.
Gabelli Funds portfolio manager John Belton said OpenAI’s growth appeared to slow from late 2025 into early 2026 as it ceded some share to Anthropic and Google’s Gemini.
The financial contrast is also uncomfortable as OpenAI does not expect to reach profitability until 2030.
Earlier Wall Street Journal reporting said Anthropic was targeting break-even by 2028, while OpenAI’s projected cash burn was far higher.
IPO countdown and the stakes just got higher
Both companies have now taken formal steps toward stock market listings.
OpenAI could target a valuation as high as $1 trillion and may go public as early as September, depending on market conditions.
Anthropic has also filed confidentially after a $65 billion funding round that valued it at $965 billion.
That has set up a rare public-market race between two private AI giants whose costs, revenues, and margins have so far been largely hidden from investors.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has described the AI listing wave as an “opening of the floodgates” for the IPO market.
That may prove right, but if a token price war begins before the filings are public, investors may focus less on the size of the opportunity and more on concerns that the industry’s biggest revenue boom is about to come with thinner margins.
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