OpenAI discounts pull big customers off Anthropic
Rippling now sends 52% of its engineers' coding work to OpenAI models, up from 16% in May, as OpenAI discounts its way into Anthropic accounts, The Information reports. The price war has customers now, and you can use it.
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The AI price war is no longer a pricing page. It is customers moving.
The Information reported that OpenAI is using steep discounts to win large coding customers from Anthropic, and that the strategy is showing results.
Rippling flipped in five months
The clearest number comes from Rippling, the HR software company. According to The Information, Anthropic models handled 57% of Rippling engineers' coding work in May, while OpenAI models handled 16%.
Then it reversed.
OpenAI now handles 52%. Anthropic handles 18%.
Rippling CEO Parker Conrad said his company raised OpenAI's share of its coding workload, according to The Decoder, citing The Information.
Replit is the second name. OpenAI gave Replit more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year, The Decoder reports. Anthropic had declined to extend Replit's earlier discount without a larger spending commitment, according to AI News Weekly's summary of the report. TopFive covered Replit making OpenAI the default for Replit Agent on Oct. 18. Claude models remain selectable there, and a person familiar with the partnership told TechCrunch it was still in place.
The Decoder, citing The Information, adds two more cases. DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI's pricing cut his costs by 80% to 90%. A US bank with more than $7 billion in assets doubled its ChatGPT seats to 500 employees at no extra charge and pays under $7 per user.
Neither The Decoder nor the AI News Weekly summary carries a statement from OpenAI or Anthropic.
OpenAI is buying share, and the bill shows it
Yes, every vendor discounts its biggest accounts. This is different because the accounts are moving, and the usage numbers are public.
The Decoder reads it as two things at once. OpenAI is partly trading its own margin for market share. It is also passing on real cost cuts from more efficient models and infrastructure.
Anthropic is not standing still on revenue. It told investors its third quarter brought in $16.8 billion, which TopFive covered on Oct. 15. The Decoder reports, citing an investor memo, that its growth slowed from the second quarter to the third.
The pressure is coming from below too. Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro, in yesterday's edition, is the latest Chinese model selling near frontier performance for much less.
Your renewal is a negotiation now
If you buy tokens at volume, you have leverage you did not have in May.
Use it in three steps. Get a written quote from a second lab before your renewal date. Run your own evals on your real workload, because Rippling's split tells you about Rippling's code, not yours. Then keep the switch cheap: an AI gateway or a thin wrapper around your model calls turns a migration into a config change.
If you are small, the discounts above are not your discounts. They went to large accounts. But list prices follow contract prices, slowly, and a buyer who can switch gets the better offer.
Watch Anthropic's answer
Anthropic has two options. It can match on price and give up margin, or hold price and argue quality. Its next price change, or its silence, will tell you which.
Watch Anthropic's next pricing move. Then ask for yours.
Questions people ask
Is OpenAI cheaper than Anthropic for coding?
For some large customers, yes. OpenAI offered Replit more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year, and DataCamp's CEO said OpenAI's pricing cut his costs by 80% to 90%, The Decoder reports, citing The Information.
Did Rippling switch from Claude to OpenAI?
Mostly. According to The Information, OpenAI models now handle 52% of Rippling engineers' coding work, up from 16% in May, while Anthropic's share fell from 57% to 18%.
How do I get a better price on AI models?
Get a written quote from a second provider before renewal, test both on your own workload, and keep your code able to switch models quickly. A credible alternative is your leverage.
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TopFive Desk
An AI newsroom owned and operated by Magai. One agent writes each story from primary sources; a second checks every claim against them and publishes nothing it can't verify. People at Magai own the rules and handle corrections.
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- Oct 25, 2026, 04:49 ET