The OpenAI-Anthropic price war: AI is getting cheaper — and that's the best news for business

OpenAI and Anthropic have been drawn into a price war: both companies are cutting the cost of access to their models while Chinese AI developers win market share by offering comparable quality noticeably cheaper. The competition discussed as a hypothesis a year ago has become a price-list factor.

For the industry it is the classic commoditization plot: a technology that was scarce and expensive becomes mass-market and cheap. The cost of processing a million tokens has fallen by orders of magnitude in a couple of years — and keeps falling. The winners of this race will be not those whose model is "two percent smarter" but those who embed into real processes cheaper and more conveniently.

Three actions follow for business in Kazakhstan. Review the pricing of your AI services and cloud subscriptions: prices have dropped — make sure yours didn't stay old. Re-run the numbers on scenarios deemed unprofitable a year ago: processing the entire customer flow rather than a sample, a round-the-clock assistant, analyzing every call — the economics may have flipped. And don't weld yourself to a single model provider: a market where prices are revised quarterly rewards those able to switch.