AT&T slashes Anthropic costs by up to 90% with aggressive open source AI pivot

AT&T has begun shifting significant portions of its artificial intelligence workloads away from Anthropic’s proprietary models toward open-source and open-weight alternatives, achieving cost reductions of 80% to 90% on targeted applications. The company currently processes roughly 45 billion AI tokens per day. About 25% of that volume already runs on open models, primarily for functions like network management. AT&T’s goal is to push that number to somewhere between 70% and 80% over time. The math behind the migration AT&T says the shift has already saved millions of dollars, though the company hasn’t disclosed a precise total figure. The savings aren’t just coming from swapping one model for a cheaper one. AT&T has built a proprietary “cache-aware AI Gateway” that handles intelligent prompt routing, essentially directing each query to the most cost-effective model capable of handling it well. Andy Markus, AT&T’s Chief Data and AI Officer, has positioned this approach as a deliberate strategic choice rather than a compromise. AT&T recently launched OTel 2.0, a specialized model trained on more than 400 billion tokens. The training infrastructure relied on ad...