The Briefing: Anthropic’s Achilles Heel

Anthropic’s IPO paperwork is expected to become public sometime soon. But it was OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar who drew a standing-room-only crowd Tuesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, as Goldman Sachs kicked off its annual Communacopia + Technology conference with a Q&A with Friar. In her talk, Friar made clear how important price has become for determining model popularity—a potential problem for Anthropic, widely seen as the high-end AI provider.

Friar described how a price cut on OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Luna model led to a tenfold increase in use, my colleague Anita Ramaswamy reported, giving OpenAI the highest market share on OpenRouter, a service developers use to access different models. We wrote in mid-August that Luna had generated more than twice the token usage of Anthropic’s Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 models on OpenRouter. Judging from Friar’s comments Tuesday, the increase in usage was enough to offset the price cut.

From Anthropic’s point of view, this isn’t an ideal time for OpenAI to be taking share, particularly if its gains are due to price. One of Anthropic’s claims to fame is its annualized revenue rate—reported to be $65 billion at the end of July—putting it well ahead of OpenAI. But a price war could change that picture. Anthropic has already responded: its new Fable 5.1 model that was unveiled last week will cost 25% less than Fable 5 for typical workloads, Anthropic said. 

To be sure, Anthropic’s technology is so good that some businesses have beenwilling to pay a premium for it. But as the quality of models advance, and the availability of cheaper models proliferates—including from open-source AI—Anthropic’s pricing power could diminish. Sure, some customers may always want the best. But that’s likely to be a diminishing number. How does Anthropic maintain its revenue edge in this environment? It’s a question investors in the upcoming IPO need to be asking.