Anthropic cuts Opus price as OpenAI matches in 90 minutes

The price cuts cap a pattern that has played out since June. Anthropic set the frontier price at $10 & $50 per million tokens with Fable 5, OpenAI answered in July with GPT-5.6 Sol at $5 & $30, and the Opus line had stayed at $5 & $25 across Opus 4.5, 4, 4.8 and 5. Yesterday's move was the first change to that line.

The pressure is not only from closed-source rivals. Open models run a majority of token volume on the gateways that publish data, at an 86% discount to closed models' blended price. Large customers are also fine tuning open-weight bases: Cursor's Composer 2 fine tuned Kimi K2.5 to cut overall cost 86% against its previous in-house model, and Harvey cut cost per cell 55% against Sonnet 5 while scoring higher than Fable 5.

The right tail looks thinner than expected. Fable 5.1 took just 3.7% of gateway spending in its first twelve days, and among large corporate accounts frontier models fell from 53% of token consumption in early August to 45% by September. The outcome likely hinges on whether those tokens shift to commodity, since that would decide the economics of the AI market.