{"id":140082,"date":"2026-08-14T14:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T14:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/140082\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T14:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T14:46:10","slug":"us-ai-labs-cut-prices-25-in-1-month-to-fend-off-chinese-rivals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/140082\/","title":{"rendered":"US AI Labs Cut Prices 25% in 1 Month to Fend Off Chinese Rivals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Consumers are paying nearly 25% less for artificial intelligence models from leading U.S. labs than they were in mid-July, following price cuts announced by OpenAI<\/a> and Anthropic<\/a>, the Financial Times reported<\/a> Friday (Aug. 14), citing data from Silicon Data<\/a>.<\/p>\n

OpenAI cut the price of its mid-tier model, GPT-5.6 Luna, by 80%, while Anthropic launched its Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its Fable 5, according to the report.<\/p>\n

These price cuts came at a time when companies are becoming more cost-conscious after seeing their AI bills rise, and when Chinese developers such as Moonshot<\/a> and DeepSeek<\/a> are gaining ground among U.S. and European customers by offering models that are cheaper and increasingly closer to the capabilities of leading U.S. models, the report said.<\/p>\n

The report said that while OpenAI and Anthropic have lowered the prices of their mid-tier models, they\u2019re maintaining or increasing the prices of their top-tier models. It added that a more capable, more expensive model may be able to complete a task with fewer tokens and therefore at a lower cost.<\/p>\n

PYMNTS has reported over the last two months that the AI price war<\/a> is real and has reached American consumers, that soaring AI costs<\/a> have pushed enterprise buyers to cheaper Chinese models and that the era of \u201ctokenmaxxing<\/a>,\u201d or pushing employees toward the biggest AI models and the heaviest usage, is ending after two years of unchecked growth.<\/p>\n

When OpenAI announced July 30 that it was cutting prices<\/a> on select models, the company said in a blog post that it made the changes to improve the models\u2019 performance per dollar across enterprise workloads.<\/p>\n

On that day, OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%, cut the price of GPT-5.6 Terra by 20% and provided faster performance of GPT-5.6 Sol in the API while leaving its price unchanged. GPT-5.6 Sol is the company\u2019s frontier model.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are building a resilient infrastructure portfolio and matching each workload to the systems best suited to run it,\u201d OpenAI said in the post. \u201cThat approach supports both ends of the price-performance curve.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was reported Thursday (Aug. 13) that DeepSeek is adding peak-hour pricing<\/a> for its flagship V4 models that will quadruple the current levels, though the new prices remain lower than those of its main competitors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consumers are paying nearly 25% less for artificial intelligence models from leading U.S. labs than they were in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,53,25,66,157,5061,310,134,311],"class_list":["post-140082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-news","tag-openai","tag-pricing","tag-pymnts-news","tag-technology","tag-whats-hot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}