OpenAI's price cuts pay off in winning orders: multiple Anthropic customers shift coding business to OpenAI

Related topics top start Related topics top end Futures promotion begin Futures promotion end Miaopai begin Miaopai end Video player start Video player end Market chart begin Market chart end

OpenAI's strategy of undercutting on price to compete with Anthropic is already showing initial results.

Parker Conrad, CEO of HR software company Rippling, said that in May of this year, 57% of the coding work of hundreds of the company's engineers was handled by Anthropic models, with OpenAI models handling only 16%. Since then the situation has reversed: today 52% of coding tasks are handled by OpenAI models, while Anthropic's share has fallen to 18%. Motivated by cost reduction, the company found OpenAI's pricing more advantageous.

Conrad said: "This summer, every company that understands the space and has the ability to evaluate costs has been significantly cutting back its use of Anthropic and switching to other tools." He did not disclose further details.

Other leading startups have made similar adjustments. People familiar with the matter said that code development platform Replit has over the past few months shifted most of its AI budget from Anthropic to OpenAI. OpenAI offered a model discount of over 30%, and the contract is worth more than $100 million annually. Replit had originally planned to continue using Anthropic, but Anthropic proposed that the preferential terms previously given to Replit could continue only if Replit committed to increasing its spending. (Replit has publicly stated that it will switch to OpenAI, but has not disclosed the discount rate or contract amount.)

Anthropic is set to launch a massive IPO as soon as next month, and investors will be watching closely for the impact of OpenAI and free open-source models on its growth. Although growth slowed noticeably from the second to the third quarter, it still remained at a high of 45%. Another potential negative: some of Anthropic's major customers, including Cognition, Meta and Microsoft, are developing their own technology and alternative solutions to reduce spending on Claude.

In recent months, OpenAI has attracted some Anthropic customers through large discounts and free credits. The offers cover the Codex coding tool as well as the various models enterprises can call via API. Previously, Anthropic leveraged its advantage in coding models to overtake OpenAI in second-quarter revenue, and in the summer its revenue scale was once about 50% higher than OpenAI's.

OpenAI says enterprise revenue growth has accelerated recently, but reliable data is hard to obtain. Data from Ramp, an enterprise spend management software commonly used by startups, shows that in the second quarter Anthropic's penetration among Ramp customers rose rapidly and surpassed OpenAI; today the two are roughly neck and neck.

Higher gross margins

As important as market share is pricing power: compared with OpenAI, Anthropic has higher gross margins. Earlier reports said Anthropic's second-quarter compute spending was only $5.6 billion (including new model R&D costs), less than half of its $11.5 billion in revenue. OpenAI, by contrast, previously forecast that its compute spending this year would be significantly higher than its revenue. That means OpenAI is trading market share for discounts at the expense of margins that are already negative.

Anthropic still acts as if it does not feel threatened. Although both Anthropic and its main rival OpenAI offer discounts to customers spending millions of dollars a year, Anthropic has a special rule: once a customer's usage reaches the contract cap, the discount is canceled—a policy that directly cost it the Replit order.

Several app developers said this has created an opportunity for OpenAI. In recent months OpenAI has launched a new generation of models that are more competitive against Anthropic than older versions. Heavy model users say switching providers is not very difficult.

People familiar with the matter said Replit needed only a few hours to modify its code and switch models from Anthropic to OpenAI; product-level adjustments took only a few days, shorter than the time it originally took to negotiate the contract with Anthropic.

Anthropic strikes back This also means that if Anthropic launches a stronger model, it has a chance to win back lost customers.

DataCamp CEO Cornelissen said: "We expect costs to fall by 80% to 90%—a very substantial reduction."

The tide may already be turning. A month ago, among OpenRouter's customers (a service platform through which enterprises can call multiple large models via a single entry point), OpenAI's usage share exceeded Anthropic's. But after Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 at the end of last month, it retook the top spot; OpenRouter data shows that over the past week or so, its popularity has been twice that of OpenAI models. (Anthropic is preparing a new model that is better at understanding user intent; OpenAI is rushing to launch a powerful new flagship while trying to avoid safety risks.)

In some cases, OpenAI is nibbling away at the budgets of Anthropic's loyal customers. Vijay Rayapati, CEO of IT ticket automation company Atomicwork, said the company has arranged for new engineers to learn to use Codex rather than Claude Code because they received free credits from OpenAI and a venture capital firm. People familiar with the matter said the VC firm is Khosla Ventures, a major OpenAI investor, which gives such credits to its portfolio companies.

Atomicwork's fiscal year runs until January next year, and it plans to spend about $2 million on Claude Code; Rayapati expects to spend close to $300,000 on Codex over the same period, versus almost zero spending on that product the previous year.

Atomicwork CEO Vijay Rayapati. Image source: Helen Shanti, Atomicwork

Some founders said OpenAI assigns dedicated staff to help customers get the most out of Codex. For example, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz shares a Slack group with OpenAI engineers and sales staff, so it can ask for help anytime it encounters problems with the coding tool; Anthropic, by contrast, did not assign engineers to join the startup's communication group with sales.

Hefty discounts

Some founders received official list-price discounts in the 20%–30% range, while OpenAI has recently offered even steeper discounts. Jonathan Cornelissen, CEO of corporate training provider DataCamp, which has about 200 employees and buys Anthropic models in large quantities, said OpenAI offered a 40% discount on the models used in its internal product development, on the condition that it also use Codex rather than competitors such as OpenCode or Claude Code.

He said DataCamp is also negotiating to have the discount apply to the OpenAI models called by the products it sells externally—even before the discount, OpenAI's pricing was already lower than Anthropic's. If it goes through, it will bring "substantial" cost savings and lift gross margins.

Cornelissen said: "We expect costs to fall by 80% to 90%—a very substantial reduction."

OpenAI is also finding ways to retain existing customers and prevent them from switching to Claude. An executive at a U.S. bank with more than $7 billion in assets said OpenAI recently allowed the bank to expand its ChatGPT accounts to 500, double the number, while keeping the annual contract fee unchanged at about $40,000. That works out to less than $7 per employee per month, far above the regular per-seat monthly price of more than $20.

The executive said the bank's marketing team uses ChatGPT to generate advertising materials and its HR team uses it to write job descriptions, and the bank had already considered moving some of that work to Claude; after OpenAI adjusted the contract terms, it dropped the idea. news_keyword_pub,usstock,MSFT&BAC iframe below body iframe below body General statement General statement QR code at end start QR code at end start

QR code at end start QR code at end start Editor name and work code

Editor name and work code