OpenAI and Anthropic Are Now in an Open Price War as Chinese Models Undercut Them by 60-90%
Ars Technica·high signal
Ars Technica, following FT reporting on August 14, 2026, documents OpenAI cutting GPT-5.6 Luna roughly 80% ($1→$0.20/M input, $6→$1.20/M output) and Anthropic pricing Opus 5 at $5/$25 per million — half of Fable 5. The trigger is Chinese models including DeepSeek, Zhipu's GLM-5.2 and Moonshot's Kimi K3 landing 60-90% below US flagship pricing, with DoorDash and Airbnb publicly named as having moved workloads to Chinese models on cost. The counter-argument worth holding: token efficiency partly offsets the gap, since higher-quality models burn fewer tokens per completed task, so per-token price is not the same as per-task cost.