OpenAI Slashes Prices by Up to 90% to Win Anthropic Customers
Aggressive pricing and architectural efficiency have enabled OpenAI to take major coding workloads from Anthropic at companies like Rippling and Replit.
In short
- OpenAI has offered discounts reaching up to 90 percent to convince enterprise customers to switch from Anthropic models.
- Rippling reversed its internal engineering usage from 57 percent Anthropic in May to 52 percent OpenAI by October 2026.
- Replit moved most of its AI spending to OpenAI in a contract valued at more than $100 million annually following a discount exceeding 30 percent.
- Anthropic faces rising financial pressure as its growth slowed between the second and third quarters of 2026.
OpenAI has initiated an aggressive discounting campaign offering price cuts of up to 90 percent to win major enterprise customers away from Anthropic. The pricing strategy has already shifted significant enterprise coding workloads at technology firms including Rippling, Replit, and DataCamp, according to reports published by The Information and The Decoder.
The move marks an escalating commercial contest between the two frontier artificial intelligence laboratories. While Anthropic had built strong adoption among software development teams throughout early 2026, corporate buyers are increasingly adjusting their vendor allocations as OpenAI pairs aggressive commercial terms with architectural efficiency gains.
Rippling and Replit Lead the Enterprise Shift
The most visible impact of OpenAI's pricing push has surfaced at HR software company Rippling. In May 2026, Anthropic models handled 57 percent of the coding work performed by hundreds of engineers at Rippling, while OpenAI models accounted for just 16 percent. Over the subsequent five months, that distribution reversed completely: OpenAI models now handle 52 percent of the company's engineering workload, leaving Anthropic with 18 percent.
Rippling Chief Executive Officer Parker Conrad attributed the reallocation directly to software expenditures, stating that his organization sought to reduce operational expenses and found OpenAI to be significantly cheaper, according to reporting by Techpresso.
Software development platform Replit made an even larger shift, moving the bulk of its AI spending away from Anthropic to OpenAI under an agreement valued at over $100 million per year. OpenAI secured the contract by offering a discount of more than 30 percent, coinciding with Anthropic ending a pricing concession it had previously granted Replit. On October 17, 2026, Replit CEO Amjad Masad confirmed his company had ended its partnership with Anthropic, citing costs, collaboration quality, and benchmark results for OpenAI's Sol and Astra models, though a person familiar with the accounts disputed the characterization of the split.
Concessions for Mid-Market Buyers and Financial Institutions
OpenAI's discounting is not confined to nine-figure enterprise software contracts. Training company DataCamp, which employs around 200 workers and had been a substantial Anthropic customer, received a 40 percent discount from OpenAI on the condition that it implement Codex instead of alternative coding tools like Claude Code or OpenCode. DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen reported that OpenAI's overall pricing cut his organization's model expenses by 80 to 90 percent, according to The Decoder.
Financial institutions are also seeing steep promotional pricing. One US bank holding more than $7 billion in assets had its ChatGPT enterprise allocation doubled to 500 employee seats without an increase in charges. The bank pays under $7 per user instead of the usual $20 or more.
Industry reporting indicates that OpenAI is partly funding these customer acquisitions by sacrificing its own near-term software margins. However, price reductions are also underpinned by structural cost decreases achieved through its Sol and Luna model families, which require fewer computational resources to run inference across common tasks.
Anthropic Confronts Margin Pressure and Rising Competition
The price war lands at a delicate juncture for Anthropic. Anthropic's growth slowed from Q2 to Q3, according to an internal investor memo. At the same time, Anthropic's initial public offering documents disclosed an $80 billion net loss across a six-month period as it targets a public valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.
OpenAI faces its own balance-sheet realities while preparing for a planned public offering by 2027. The company is completing a $30 billion financing round led by Coatue and United Arab Emirates investors at a $1.25 trillion valuation, a figure lowered from its earlier $1.4 trillion target amid cooling investor demand.
Both Western developers are simultaneously facing external price pressure from Chinese artificial intelligence labs. Frontier models released by DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's Kimi have demonstrated comparable performance on developer benchmarks while charging a fraction of Western API prices. With multiple leading models converging in core coding capabilities, enterprise procurement teams are demonstrating that pricing and contract terms now dictate vendor selection.
Questions people ask
How large are the discounts OpenAI is offering to Anthropic customers?
Discounts reported by customers range from over 30 percent on nine-figure enterprise contracts at Replit to overall cost reductions of 80 to 90 percent at firms like DataCamp.
Why did Rippling shift its coding workload away from Anthropic?
Rippling CEO Parker Conrad stated that the company changed providers to cut engineering costs, increasing OpenAI's share of its coding tasks from 16 to 52 percent while Anthropic dropped from 57 to 18 percent.
What models is OpenAI using to lower inference costs?
OpenAI has lowered pricing partly through structural efficiencies in its Sol and Luna model architectures, alongside benchmark-competing releases like GPT-6 Astra.
Sources
- The Informationtheinformation.com
- Short News ArchiveThe Decoder
- OpenAI offers discounts up to 90 percent to poach Anthropic's biggest customersThe Decoder, Oct 25, 2026
- OpenAI Is Slashing Prices to Steal Anthropic's Biggest Customers, and Replit and Rippling Already SwitchedTechpresso, Oct 25, 2026
How this story was made: the newsroom picked it up from the-decoder.com, gathered the full text of the sources above, and drafted it with AI assistance. Every factual claim was then checked against those sources before publishing (30 claims checked). Illustrations marked as AI-generated are not photographs. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Published October 26, 2026 at 00:39 UTC
