OpenAI and Anthropic to Cut LLM Prices by Up to 80% Within Months; Max Woolf Analyzes the Reasons

Max Woolf traces the timeline of OpenAI's and Anthropic's model releases and price adjustments from June to September 2026, noting that the prices of the two companies' flagship models have fallen by about 75% cumulatively, with GPT-5.6 Luna seeing a single price cut of 80%. He argues that models are becoming increasingly homogeneous and switching costs are extremely low, and that, combined with the number of providers hosting DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on OpenRouter rising to 29, this creates sustained price pressure. The author also mentions that the two companies are approaching IPOs, and says the inference business itself may still have relatively healthy profit margins.