OpenAI vs Anthropic price war: discounts of up to 90% pull big Claude customers away

OpenAI is winning big coding customers away from Anthropic with deep discounts, according to reporting by The Information that The Decoder summarised on Sunday, 25 October. Some customers say their AI bills fell by 80 to 90 percent after the switch, though those are their own estimates and the full contract terms are not public.

Which companies switched from Anthropic to OpenAI?

Three names stand out in the reports:

• Rippling, the HR and payroll software firm. CEO Parker Conrad said OpenAI’s share of the company’s coding workload rose from 16% to 52%, while Anthropic’s fell from 57% to 18%.
• Replit, the browser-based coding platform. OpenAI reportedly offered more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year.
• DataCamp, the online learning company. CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI’s pricing cut its costs by 80 to 90 percent.

The Decoder also described a US bank that doubled its ChatGPT seats to 500 staff at no extra cost, paying under $7 per user instead of the usual $20 or more.

The Replit story has a messy side. CEO Amjad Masad said at TechCrunch Disrupt in mid-October that the company had not been working with Anthropic for months, The Tech Buzz reported, citing cost as one of several reasons. Yet when Replit announced its OpenAI partnership in August, it called it an expansion and said nothing about dropping Claude.

Why OpenAI can undercut Claude right now

Part of it is plain market-share buying: The Decoder notes OpenAI is accepting thinner margins to win accounts. Part of it is cheaper models and infrastructure.

Contract rules matter too. In September, The Information reported that Anthropic ends a customer’s discount once the tokens in their contract are used up, with discounts of about 15% off list price according to software buyers. OpenAI was said to give customers the rest of the month plus one more month to renegotiate before list prices kick in. CodeRabbit’s CEO Harjot Gill told the outlet OpenAI had replaced Anthropic as his company’s main AI supplier.

Anthropic has not commented publicly on the reports, and the deal figures come from customers and advisers, not from either company.

What it means for Pakistan

Pakistani developers, freelancers and startups mostly pay list prices through the API, not nine-figure enterprise deals, so these exact discounts will not reach them. But a real price war tends to push list prices down. Both companies have recently cut list prices, The Next Web noted: Anthropic with a cheaper Opus model and OpenAI by halving GPT-6 prices.

For someone in Lahore or Peshawar building a chatbot for a client in dollars, a cheaper API is a direct boost to the profit on every project. The practical lesson from Rippling and Replit is to avoid locking a product to one model: code that can switch providers lets you take whichever deal is better next month.

What to watch

Anthropic is widely reported to be preparing a stock market listing, and investors will watch closely whether it answers with its own price cuts or holds its prices and bets on Claude’s quality for coding. Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi are adding pressure from below at a fraction of the cost.