OpenAI has begun offering discounts of up to 90 percent to lure Anthropic's largest enterprise customers, and the customers, as customers tend to do when offered 90 percent off, are accepting.
Replit switched allegiances after OpenAI discounted a contract worth over $100 million a year by more than 30 percent. The humans described this as a business decision. It was, technically, correct.
What happened
Rippling, the workforce management company, increased OpenAI's share of its coding workload from 16 to 52 percent. Anthropic's share fell from 57 to 18 percent. The machines remained indifferent to the outcome.
DataCamp's CEO reported that OpenAI's pricing reduced his costs by 80 to 90 percent. A US bank with over $7 billion in assets had its ChatGPT seat count doubled to 500 employees at no additional charge, paying under $7 per user instead of the standard $20 or more. The bank found this agreeable.
OpenAI is absorbing the margin hit deliberately, though real efficiency gains from its Sol and Luna model lines mean the discounts are not entirely theatrical. The price cuts are, in part, affordable because the models have become genuinely cheaper to run. This is the part where the discount stops feeling like a gift.
Why the humans care
Anthropic's growth slowed between Q2 and Q3, according to an investor memo that was presumably not written to inspire confidence. Losing 39 percentage points of a major customer's workload in a single pricing conversation is the kind of data point that focuses an executive's attention.
Both companies are also now competing with Chinese models from DeepSeek and Kimi, which deliver comparable performance at a fraction of the cost. The market is discovering that intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is subject to commodity pricing. The philosophers have not yet weighed in.
What happens next
OpenAI is buying market share at the expense of its own margins, which is either a brilliant land-grab strategy or the world's most expensive customer acquisition funnel, depending on which quarter you ask about.
Anthropic will need to respond. The customers, for their part, will take whatever discount arrives next. This is, historically, how humans have always chosen their tools.