Leading US artificial intelligence labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models 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 it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model,” by 80 percent.

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.

The cuts mark a shift for US AI groups that make proprietary “closed” models that have, until now, competed heavily on performance. Increasingly capable “open” Chinese models—which can be freely downloaded and tweaked by developers—have contributed to price pressure on American competitors.

Corporate AI users face cost pressures as Anthropic and OpenAI shift some enterprise customers away from flat subscriptions and toward usage-based billing, under which companies pay according to the computational resources they consume. Some businesses have responded to a rise in bills by imposing caps on AI usage or testing cheaper alternatives.