OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman has signaled that the company is prepared to initiate a significant price war, aiming to slash the costs of its flagship artificial intelligence models. The move comes as OpenAI faces mounting pressure from US-based rival Anthropic and a surge of cost-effective, high-performance alternatives emerging from China.
In a social media statement on Tuesday, Altman highlighted that the company’s flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, is currently priced at half the cost of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. He added that OpenAI would be “happy to deliver at one-quarter of the price” if necessary to maintain its market position. These costs are measured via AI tokens, the fundamental units used by models to process and generate information for tasks ranging from chatbot interactions to video production.
The shift follows a year of significant market gains for Anthropic, particularly among enterprise customers and developers who have increasingly adopted the company’s Claude Code tool. Simultaneously, Chinese AI developers have aggressively lowered the cost of their own frontier models, placing further strain on OpenAI’s pricing structure. While OpenAI had previously reduced rates for the GPT-5.6 series compared to earlier generations, its flagship and mid-tier models have remained more expensive than many competing services, prompting this strategic pivot to protect its market share.