Anthropic and OpenAI Slash Prices on New AI Models

OpenAI and Anthropic both rolled out cheaper AI models on Tuesday, cutting API costs by 40–50% as the two frontier labs confront mounting pressure from lower-priced, open-weight competitors.

OpenAI expanded its GPT-6 family with two new tiers: GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. The additions cut API prices by 50% compared with GPT-5.6 promotional pricing. Sol, which sits a tier below Astra, targets complex workloads such as coding. Luna is built for "high-volume tasks" like extracting information or summarizing documents, the company wrote.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, the latest model in its new Claude 5.5 family. The company described it as a more token-efficient version that will cost roughly 40% less to run than Opus 5.

"One of the things we're continuing to innovate on is how to make that thinking, how to make the answering more efficient, so it uses less tokens depending on your effort setting," Dianne Penn, head of product management, research and labs at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview.

The releases are the first from either lab since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for an industrywide slowdown on developing advanced AI, a demand that sharpened an already heated debate over model safety in recent weeks. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joined Amodei's call.

The debate began when former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon posted on X on Sept. 8 that he had quit his job, warning that both labs were "gambling with our lives."

Tuesday's launches show the labs prioritizing a different pressure point: cost. Enterprise customers are pushing for more cost-effective models as they seek to rein in AI spending. Both companies face competition from firms offering cheaper open-weight models, including Chinese players Alibaba, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek.

The pricing strategy signals where the frontier-lab competition now sits. Efficiency gains in token use, rather than raw capability alone, have become a selling point — Penn framed Anthropic's innovation explicitly in terms of using fewer tokens per answer.

With Altman, Musk and Amodei publicly aligned on slowing advanced development even as both companies ship new products, the gap between safety rhetoric and release cadence is likely to remain the central tension investors and enterprise buyers watch.