Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals. The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe. OpenAI recently said that it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model”, by 80 per cent. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, touting the system’s “frontier intelligence . . . at half the price” of Fable 5, the company’s most capable model. The moves have helped decrease prices that customers are paying for models from leading US labs by almost a quarter since mid-July, according to Silicon Data’s token price index. Tokens are the units of data processed by language models and are used to calculate many customers’ bills.

Full report : Leading US AI labs are releasing cheaper models to gain customers even as Chinese AI labs are gaining ground.