OpenAI Is Reportedly Undercutting Anthropic to Win Its Biggest Customers

In May, Anthropic's models handled 57% of the coding work done by Rippling's engineers. OpenAI handled 16%. Five months later those numbers have flipped, with OpenAI at 52% and Anthropic at 18%, and the reason Rippling CEO Parker Conrad gave was not benchmarks or vibes. It was price.

That is the sharpest detail in a report by The Information published on October 24, which says OpenAI is using aggressive discounts to pull business customers away from its biggest rival. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has publicly confirmed them, so treat this as a well sourced report rather than settled fact. Still, if even half of it holds up, the AI price war is no longer theoretical.

Rippling is not the biggest scalp. According to The Information, Replit moved most of its AI spending to OpenAI after OpenAI offered more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year. A person familiar with the deal told the publication that Anthropic would not extend an earlier discount unless Replit committed to spending more. Replit CEO Amjad Masad, announcing the switch at TechCrunch Disrupt, called it "a decision based on both cost, partnership, and performance," according to TechCrunch. Replit says its users can still pick Claude.

Then there is DataCamp, and here the numbers need care. Some coverage has framed the story as OpenAI handing out discounts of up to 90%. That is not what the report describes. According to The Information, OpenAI offered DataCamp a 40% discount on models it uses internally, on the condition that it adopt OpenAI's Codex coding agent instead of rivals such as Claude Code. The bigger figure is CEO Jonathan Cornelissen's estimate of what DataCamp could save overall, because OpenAI's models were already cheaper than Anthropic's before the markdown.

"We're looking at an 80% to 90% decrease in costs." Jonathan Cornelissen, CEO of DataCamp, to The Information

So the 80 to 90% is a projected cost cut for one customer, stacked on cheaper list prices, not a discount OpenAI is offering across the board. It is still brutal for Anthropic.

The push reportedly reaches well beyond coding startups. The Decoder, summarizing The Information, says a US bank with more than $7 billion in assets had its ChatGPT seats doubled to 500 employees at no extra charge, bringing its cost to under $7 per user against the usual $20 or more.

Anthropic picked a bad month to hold the line

The timing is what makes this sting. The Information reported that Anthropic is set to go public next month, which makes this the worst moment for headlines about marquee customers walking out. Investors were already reconsidering Anthropic's valuation before this report landed. The Decoder cites an investor memo saying Anthropic's growth slowed from the second quarter to the third, while Chosun Biz, also citing The Information, puts Anthropic's third quarter growth in the business AI market at a still healthy 45%.

Anthropic's reported refusal to discount without bigger commitments looks like a company protecting its margins ahead of a listing. OpenAI is doing the opposite. The Decoder argues OpenAI is partly buying market share at the expense of its own margins, though it also credits real efficiency gains in OpenAI's newer models. The Information noted the discounts could add to OpenAI's already heavy computing costs.

The Information reported that Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 reclaimed the top spot on OpenRouter drawing about twice the usage of OpenAI's models in the week covered. Plenty of developers still want Claude when they choose freely.

The uncomfortable lesson in the Replit story is how little loyalty exists. The Information reported that Replit swapped its models in a matter of hours. If switching a nine figure contract takes an afternoon, price becomes the product, and the lab with the deepest pockets gets to set it. Right now, by this account, that lab is OpenAI.