Topline
OpenAI is considering major price cuts for its AI tools in a bid to compete with rival Anthropic, according to a Wall Street Journal report, as both companies prepare to go public later this year and the steep usage cost prompts some companies to scale back or limit usage.
Key Facts
According to the Journal, OpenAI’s planned price cuts will focus on its tokens—the units used to track AI tool usage for billing—as the ChatGPT maker expects similar moves from Anthropic.
Instead of flat monthly subscriptions—which have stringent usage caps and other limits—most major business customers use metered billing via tokens for AI products and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged that the rising costs of tokens have become a “huge issue.”
Speaking at an OpenAI event earlier this month, Altman said it was almost becoming a “meme” now to say a company has used up its entire budget allocation for AI tokens in Q1, prompting executives to ask him, “Can you make this more efficient?”
It’s unclear how OpenAI plans to implement this token price cut and if such cuts will be applied across their existing AI models, including the flagship GPT‑5.5 Pro.
At the event, Altman said the company is continuing to push on efficiency more with its models and added: “We’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend,” without offering specific details.
What Do We Know About The Tokenmaxxing Reversal?
As major tech firms embraced the use of AI tools internally, a phenomenon called “tokenmaxxing” emerged, encouraging the heavy use of AI tokens for work and even using them as a metric to track productivity. However, over the past few months, companies have started acknowledging the steep costs of “tokenmaxxing” with Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga telling The Information in April that his company had already burned through its entire 2026 AI token budget. Last month, the Financial Times reported that some Amazon employees have been using the company’s internal AI tools for non-essential tasks to inflate token usage numbers in response to tokenmaxxing pressures. The report noted similar issues at Meta as well.
What About Price Cuts To Subscriptions?
Google announced last week it is cutting the price of its cheapest Gemini AI Plus plan while expanding its perks. The price of the AI Plus subscription—which offers access to the Gemini 3 Pro model and the image-generation tool Nano Banana Pro—was cut from $8 per month to $5 per month. Gemini subscriptions product lead Vikas Kansal announced on X that the plan will also include an increase in Google Drive storage from 200GB to 400GB. Google’s new plan undercuts ChatGPT’s cheapest “Go” tier subscription, which is priced at $8 per month. In India, a key market for AI platforms, both Google’s and OpenAI’s cheapest plans start at Rs 399 per month, which is around $4.20.
OpenAI Considers Drastic Price Cuts, Anticipating War for Users With Anthropic (Wall Street Journal)
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