OpenAI Offers 90% Discounts to Poach Anthropic Clients
OpenAI is offering discounts of up to 90 percent to win big Anthropic customers like Replit, Rippling and DataCamp, trading short-term margin for market share.
OpenAI is reportedly offering discounts of up to 90 percent to pull major customers away from Anthropic, and the strategy is working. Companies such as Rippling, Replit and DataCamp are shifting more of their AI spending to OpenAI, according to a report by The Information relayed by The Decoder. The move turns the AI rivalry into an open price war. Instead of competing only on model quality, OpenAI is competing on price, even if that means giving up profit in the short term to win long-term customers.
Replit, Rippling and DataCamp switch sides
Replit switched after OpenAI offered more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year. Replit chief executive Amjad Masad said onstage in San Francisco on October 16 that the company was no longer working with Anthropic, while later adding that Replit remains model agnostic and that OpenAI is now its preferred partner for powering Replit Agent. Rippling chief executive Parker Conrad said his company raised OpenAI's share of its coding workload from 16 percent to 52 percent, while Anthropic's share fell from 57 percent to 18 percent. DataCamp chief executive Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI's pricing cut his company's AI costs by 80 to 90 percent, although another report puts DataCamp's Codex discount at 40 percent. The exact saving varies by contract, but the direction is the same: large customers are paying far less than before. A US bank with more than $7 billion in assets also reportedly doubled its ChatGPT seats to 500 employees at no extra charge, paying under $7 per user instead of the usual $20 or more.
Why OpenAI is cutting prices now
OpenAI is partly buying market share at the expense of its own margins. But it has also achieved real cost cuts through its newer Sol and Luna model lines, which are more efficient to run. The timing matters for Anthropic. An investor memo says Anthropic's growth slowed from the second quarter to the third quarter, so losing large accounts could hurt further. The reports include no statement from Anthropic. Both companies also face growing price pressure from China, where models from DeepSeek and Kimi deliver comparable performance for a fraction of the cost. When cheaper rivals set the floor, enterprise customers can treat frontier models as swappable and shop on price.
What this means for the AI market
The discount war shows how fast the AI business is changing. A year ago, the fight was mainly about which model was smartest. Now it is also about which company can afford to charge the least while keeping customers locked in. For customers, that is good news in the short term: lower bills and more bargaining power. For the labs, it is a risk: deep discounts today only pay off if those customers stay and spend more later. Watch whether Anthropic answers with its own discounts, and whether OpenAI can hold these prices without hurting its margins. If the price war spreads, smaller labs may find it even harder to compete.
Sources
- The Decoder - https://the-decoder.com/openai-offers-discounts-up-to-90-percent-to-poach-anthropics-biggest-customers/ - MachineBrief - https://www.machinebrief.com/news/openai-offers-discounts-up-to-90-percent-to-poach-anthropics-j8fl - Oossa - https://oossa.com/en/openai-gives-up-to-90-discounts-to-win-anthropic-s-biggest-clients