US labs cut AI inference costs nearly 25% amid price war

The cost of thinking, at least the artificial kind, just got a lot cheaper. Average prices for AI inference from leading US labs dropped nearly 25% between mid-July and mid-August, according to Silicon Data analysis reported by the Financial Times. Who cut what, and by how much OpenAI moved first on July 30, taking a machete to pricing on two of its three GPT-5.6 model tiers. GPT-5.6 Luna, the company’s mid-range offering, saw an 80% price reduction. GPT-5.6 Terra got a 20% haircut. The flagship GPT-5.6 Sol held steady, though OpenAI sweetened the deal by accelerating its performance options at the same price point. Anthropic followed a similar playbook, launching Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its predecessor, Fable 5. The DeepSeek effect The pressure is coming primarily from Chinese providers, with DeepSeek and Moonshot leading the charge. These firms offer models that either match or closely approach US performance benchmarks, but at dramatically lower price points. To put the broader trajectory in perspective: GPT-4-class performance cost over $20 per million tokens in late 2022. By mid-2026, that same tier of capability costs less than $1 per million tokens across various ...