Frontier labs rethink AI pricing models as budgets tighten

The companies selling AI to corporate America have hit an awkward problem. Their customers are using the product so heavily that they are running out of money to pay for it. According to the Financial Times, AI tools are chewing through enterprise budgets fast enough to force a rethink of how frontier labs price their models. That rethink is unfolding as OpenAI and Anthropic move toward initial public offerings. The price cuts, by the numbers The discounts have been steep. OpenAI cut pricing on its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80% in late July, bringing it to $0.20/$1.20 per million tokens. Those paired figures follow the usual industry format. The first is the cost of text you send the model, and the second is the cost of text it sends back. Anthropic followed with its own moves. In August 2026, it made Sonnet 5’s pricing permanent at $2/$10 and reduced Opus 5.5 to $4/$20, a change that delivered nearly 40% savings through efficiency gains. Then came a concentrated 72-hour stretch in early September 2026. During that window, Anthropic cut cache-read pricing on its Fable 5.1 model by 75%, to $0.25 per million tokens. Cache reads are the AI equivalent of a coffee shop remembering your usua...