Big companies and startups, chafing at rapidly escalating artificial intelligence costs, are increasingly turning to tools that tap in to cheaper AI models, including some from China. That’s raising pressure on industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic to lower their prices, a prospect that could hurt their ability to grow into profitable enterprises. The new cost-saving tools help businesses save on AI costs by dynamically switching among a mixture of third-party AI models and in-house AI systems built using freely available, open-source models. The ecosystem allows autonomous AI systems, or agents, to use cheap models—including those made by Chinese companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek—for many functions. The agents only tap the most capable versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for more complex tasks.

Full report : Companies with rising AI costs are increasingly using tools that tap cheaper models, including some from China, putting pricing pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic.