OpenAI’s Price War with Anthropic Could Undermine Its IPO
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 10 that OpenAI is weighing vital reductions to the costs it prices for tokens.
The discussions are described as nonetheless in flux, however this exhibits that OpenAI sees Anthropic closing the hole and is contemplating utilizing worth as a weapon.
The Numbers Behind the Pressure
Anthropic’s annualized run rate stood at roughly $1 billion at the beginning of 2025. By April 2026, that determine had reached $30 billion, a trajectory that CEO Dario Amodei described as outstripping the corporate’s personal forecasts by an element of eight.
Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent, hit $1 billion in annualized income inside six months of its public launch in May 2025 and surpassed $2.5 billion by February 2026.
Business subscriptions to Claude Code quadrupled within the first quarter of 2026 alone. Some analysts now estimate Anthropic’s annualized income might have crossed $47 billion by May 2026.
OpenAI, by comparability, reported a revenue run rate of roughly $13 billion in 2025 and doesn’t count on to show a revenue or generate constructive free money stream till 2030.
That hole in development trajectory, not simply in present income, is what makes Anthropic’s rise threatening sufficient to immediate a pricing response.
The IPO Paradox
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are understood to be eyeing public listings. OpenAI has been in discussions for a funding spherical that will worth the corporate at $750 billion. Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G in February 2026 at a $380 billion post-money valuation.
Deliberately chopping the worth of your core product instantly earlier than that course of is a call many would view as damaging to its IPO objectives.
The counterargument is that decrease costs drive quantity, which in flip drives income. That logic holds in markets the place demand is very elastic and the place the corporate’s price base is manageable.
AI infrastructure is neither. Training and serving frontier fashions is pricey at a degree most industries by no means encounter. OpenAI’s personal management has acknowledged that the price of coaching a single aggressive mannequin is approaching, and in some projections, far exceeding $1 billion.
Cutting token costs in that atmosphere doesn’t robotically translate into greater income. It can simply as simply imply extra loss, unfold throughout a bigger buyer base.
The submit OpenAI’s Price War with Anthropic Could Undermine Its IPO appeared first on BeInCrypto.
