AI Prices are Plummeting? Why ChatGPT and Claude Started a 'Half-Price War'

Imagine this. What if your mobile phone bill, which used to be 100,000 won a month, suddenly dropped to 20,000 won, or even to the 1,000 won range? A situation where the service quality or call audio remains the same, but only the price has miraculously decreased. You might think, “Could that really happen?”, but in the artificial intelligence (AI) market, which boasts the smartest brains in the world right now, this unbelievable ‘massive bargain sale’ is actually taking place.

Currently, the two giants of the AI industry, ‘OpenAI’, which created ChatGPT, and ‘Anthropic’, which introduced Claude, are engaging in a fierce price-cutting war, pointing at each other’s throats. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have moved beyond simply competing on AI quality, and have now drawn their most powerful weapon, ‘price’, to secure even one more developer or corporate customer.

An even more interesting fact is that these companies are not lowering prices because they have too much money left over. It’s quite the opposite. Due to the massive computing costs (computer calculation resource costs) required to maintain and operate high-performance AI systems, OpenAI and Anthropic are already recording massive deficits in the trillions of won (billions of dollars) every year. In this bizarre situation where bank balances are shrinking and deficits are snowballing, yet prices for goods are being discounted, what exactly is happening behind the scenes of the AI world?

Why It Matters

You might think, “What does it have to do with me using ChatGPT for free if companies are fighting bloodily among themselves?” However, this war is an event important enough to completely change our daily lives in the near future.

Let’s recall the time when we first started using smartphones. Back then, when data rates were as expensive as gold, we carefully used the internet while looking for places with Wi-Fi. But what happened when ‘unlimited data plans’ became universal and data prices dropped? We now live in an era where watching YouTube on the street, finding directions in real-time, and streaming music are as natural as breathing. When the ‘cost’ of using a technology decreases, innovations utilizing that technology spread explosively into every corner of our lives.

AI is walking exactly the same path. Until now, introducing smart AI into a service cost an unbearable amount of money. The wall of cost was too high for a local bakery owner to create an AI chatbot to respond to regular customers, or for a newly launched startup to add a personal assistant feature to their app. However, with the possibility raised that OpenAI will significantly lower the price of its next-generation model, GPT-5.6, cutting-edge AI technology is now becoming a much more familiar tool even for small and medium-sized enterprises lacking capital. This is a very important sign that AI is changing from an expensive ‘luxury’ into a basic infrastructure, like ‘electricity’ or ‘water’, that anyone can plug into and use.

The Explainer: Mixing and Matching and the Rebellion of Cost-Effectiveness

So why are these expensive and precious AIs scrambling to lower their price tags? Hidden here is the smart survival strategy of companies.

Let’s compare the situation to this. Imagine you are preparing a large-scale party with hundreds of guests. In the past, you left all the food entirely to a top-tier Michelin 3-star chef (top-tier AI model) that costs hundreds of thousands of won per meal. The taste is guaranteed, but you’d almost faint looking at the bill that flies in after the party. Over time, smart organizers come up with a new strategy. “Let’s leave only the steak, the most important main dish, to the Michelin chef (OpenAI, Anthropic), and order simple menus like salads or french fries from a cheap but decent local restaurant (low-cost AI)!”

In fact, the scene unfolding in the IT industry right now is exactly the same. To avoid the expensive fees demanded by leading companies, many customers, from startups to large corporations, are adopting a ‘Mixing and Matching’ approach of selectively using multiple AI models depending on the difficulty of the task. For simple tasks like fixing typos in an email or summarizing a long article into one sentence, they use a cheap AI that costs 10 cents, and they only call an expensive AI that costs a dollar when writing complex programs or analyzing difficult research papers. As companies began to close their wallets like this, the previously arrogant giant AI companies had no choice but to lower their prices to hold onto their customers.

On top of this, a ‘catfish’ (disruptor) that delivered a decisive blow has appeared. These are powerful latecomers like DeepSeek. The open-source models (whose blueprints are open to everyone) released by DeepSeek are showing off similar performance at a price 7 to as much as 50 times cheaper than the costs charged by OpenAI or Anthropic. Because of this, some are even raising suspicions that Western AI companies have been taking too much excessive profit all along. Since the restaurant next door started selling steaks of almost the same taste at 1/50th of the price, the Michelin chefs have no choice but to erase the prices on their menus while breaking into a cold sweat.

Where We Stand: Shaking Empires and Fiercely Rising Pursuers

The results of this fierce war are already appearing in cold numbers. The ‘Empire of ChatGPT’, which seemed like it would never fall forever, is shaking. In fact, ChatGPT’s share of global generative AI web traffic (visit volume) dropped significantly from an overwhelming 77.6% in May 2025 to 53.7% in April 2026, in just one year.

Particularly in the market of paying corporate customers, the momentum of its rival Anthropic is fearsome. The survey results from the corporate spend management platform Ramp are even more shocking. For the first time in history, the number of companies paying for and using Anthropic’s AI service has become larger than that of OpenAI. Anthropic has recently been growing at a terrifying speed, leading with features useful for practical work, such as corporate coding tools.

In particular, Anthropic’s ‘Claude Fable 5’ model is receiving praise for its outstanding ability to solve complex logic problems or organize the sequence of tasks on its own. However, there are also criticisms that it is somewhat inconvenient to use because it emphasizes security too much and refuses to answer even slightly sensitive questions from users, so Anthropic has promised to improve this.

With the situation getting to this point, the one most anxious is OpenAI. Even OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman, could not hide his feeling of pressure from the price competition at a recent public event. In response, it is known that OpenAI is considering a plan to drastically lower its AI usage fees to turn around customers who are leaving for competitors.

However, experts are also sending concerned looks. This is because if these companies, which are already pouring in billions of dollars every year, even lower their prices, their deficit sinkhole will inevitably deepen. Literally, a game of survival where you ‘give up flesh to cut the bone’ has begun.

What’s Next

This bloody competition goes beyond simply the problem of ‘who sells cheaper’; it is fundamentally changing the way we subscribe to and use AI itself. In May 2026, when Anthropic threw down the gauntlet by completely revamping its subscription plans, OpenAI also responded with immediate promotions. This is a strategic move to bring developers and companies that use AI as a tool to their side, and it is like a trailer that previews completely shaking up the landscape of the AI ecosystem in the future.

Right now, as countless startups and Big Tech companies put their heads together to save even a single penny on expensive AI costs, the ultimate winner will be the company that supplies ‘the most reliable intelligence at the cheapest price.’

But the real winners are elsewhere. It is the tens of thousands of developers who will create creative services using the AI that has become cheaper thanks to this fierce fight, and all of us who will finally enjoy AI as naturally and cheaply as air, like data on our smartphones. The era where artificial intelligence becomes a true ‘tool for everyone’ is approaching us much faster than we thought.

AI’s Take

“The so-called ‘game of chicken’ (winner-takes-all competition) of giant companies unfolding even at the risk of deficits may be a painful process for the parties involved, but from the perspective of the popularization of technology for all of humanity, it is a very powerful catalyst. Just as the digital revolution began in the 1990s as high-speed internet networks were installed in every home, the plummeting AI usage fees now will be recorded as a solid cornerstone for the ‘AI Infrastructure Era’ that will later connect all industries worldwide with artificial intelligence. We are currently passing right through the middle of an historic popularization of technology.”

References

1. [The AI Price War Is Here, Piling Pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

   Business News](https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/the-ai-price-war-is-here-piling-pressure-on-openai-and-anthropic-101781258437644.html)

2. [The AI price war is here, piling pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

   Mint](https://www.livemint.com/ai/the-ai-price-war-is-here-piling-pressure-on-openai-and-anthropic-11781229393891.html)

3. [OpenAI Considers Drastic Price Cuts as AI Token War With Anthropic Heats Up

   OpenTools](https://opentools.ai/news/openai-drastic-price-cuts-anthropic-token-war-2026)

4. OpenAI Wants a Price War With Anthropic—Is It Proving DeepSeek Right? - Decrypt
5. OpenAI Execs Are Panicking
6. OpenAI Price War With Anthropic Could Reshape AI Costs, but DeepSeek Already Set the Floor - Memeburn
7. OpenAI vs Anthropic: Inside the 2026 AI Price War - Geeky Gadgets
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