OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

Post by mnicky » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:20 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #75

swiftcoder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon was pretty famous for never actually posting a profit for their first ~10 years of operation

> Amazon was pretty famous for never actually posting a profit for their first ~10 years of operation They were spending the profit from each user, not making a loss on each user. It's a big difference. To turn a profit all AMZN had to do was stop spending (and the consumers would not have been affected by the halting of spending). For the AI providers, to turn a profit they have to raise the price.

Post by panos_news » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

mattjoyce wrote: post #28

WhitneyLand wrote: post #11

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release. The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable. If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

At the right price, these model don't need to be the best, good enough will do. I think we're fast approaching good enough for most users.

Post by solumunus » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

mynegation wrote: post #65

ralph84 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.

Apple, sure. But Google and Meta are really advertising companies, whose income stream comes from enterprises, big and small.

Post by ethbr1 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #13

WhitneyLand wrote: post #11

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release. The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable. If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users. I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

   1. Surprise product growth
   2. Revenue go brr, org expands
   3. Everyone gets promoted as org expands
   4. Because the product sold itself, there was little selection pressure on the sales / customer success orgs to evaluate their effectiveness
   5. Leadership gets saturated with people who just aren't very good at their job
   6. None of those people get fired/demoted, because the company never had to develop "What to do with a bad leader?" muscles
   7. This eventually manifests as an increasing (customer)  (engineering) disconnect (as sales/cs aren't doing their job)
   8. People begin to ask why the company isn't doing (insert obvious thing)
   9. It's because VP-of-whatever is chasing fantasies instead of reporting customer needs to engineering

Post by jrsj » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

WhitneyLand wrote: post #11

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release. The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable. If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.