When Token Wars Hit IPO Oars: OpenAI Mulls Price Cuts as Anthropic Closes In 🚢

OpenAI is weighing significant reductions to the prices it charges for tokens, a move reported by The Wall Street Journal on June 10 that signals the company sees Anthropic narrowing the gap and is preparing to use pricing as a competitive lever. The discussions remain in flux. Both companies have filed confidentially for IPOs this month, and neither has turned a profit. "I think we'll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend," Sam Altman said at a recent event, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The pressure on margins is already visible in OpenAI's filings. The company posted a -122% adjusted operating margin in Q1 2026, losing $1.22 for every dollar it brought in. OpenAI reported a revenue run rate of approximately $13 billion in 2025 and does not expect to turn a profit or generate positive free cash flow before 2030. Training a single competitive model is approaching, and in some projections far exceeding, $1 billion in cost, according to OpenAI's own leadership. Cutting token prices in that environment does not automatically translate into higher profits, and could spread losses across a larger customer base.

Anthropic's trajectory is the backdrop. Its annualized run rate was roughly $1 billion at the start of 2025, $9 billion at the end of 2025, and reached $30 billion by April 2026, a path CEO Dario Amodei described as outstripping the company's own forecasts by a factor of eight. Some analysts estimate the figure may have crossed $47 billion by May 2026, a 422% jump in five months. Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent launched publicly in May 2025, hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months and surpassed $2.5 billion by February 2026, with business subscriptions quadrupling in Q1 2026. Q2 2026 was the company's first profitable quarter. Anthropic now projects higher revenue than OpenAI in 2029 and targets turning FCF positive by 2028. The company closed a $30 billion Series G in February 2026 at a $380 billion post-money valuation, while OpenAI has been in discussions for a funding round at a $750 billion valuation.

Market-share data underscores the shift. ChatGPT's share of global generative AI web traffic fell from 77.6% in May 2025 to 53.7% by April 2026, Decrypt previously reported, and for the first time more companies tracked by the Ramp AI Index are paying for Anthropic than for OpenAI. OpenAI has since made its own coding tool, Codex, a company priority. Dario Amodei has said Anthropic's growth outstripped the company's own forecasts by a factor of eight.

The broader spending picture is drawing scrutiny. Uber's CTO burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April, some JP Morgan employees are spending more on AI use than their own salary according to the bank's chief data officer for its payments division, and JP Morgan analysts published a note this month titled "AI Bills Are Out of Control." Palantir CEO Alex Karp compared the practice of burning through as many AI tokens as possible, a behavior Silicon Valley has taken to calling "tokenmaxxing," to a porn addiction at AIPCon last week.