OpenAI is cutting prices by as much as 90 percent to pull Anthropic’s biggest customers across, and according to a new report, it’s working. The Information’s reporting, relayed by The Decoder, names the accounts: Rippling, Replit, and DataCamp have all shifted a sizable share of their AI spending to OpenAI after being offered discounts that range from more than 30 percent to as much as 90 percent off.
That’s not a sale. It’s a siege.
At Rippling, the shift is already visible in the workload numbers. CEO Parker Conrad said OpenAI’s share of the company’s coding work rose from 16 percent to 52 percent, while Anthropic’s fell from 57 percent to 18 percent. Replit switched after OpenAI offered more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year. And DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI’s pricing cut his company’s AI costs by 80 to 90 percent.
The deals behind the OpenAI Anthropic discounts
Each defection has its own shape, and the details matter more than the headline number. Rippling’s move is the cleanest example: a straight workload flip, measured in percentages, from one provider to the other. Replit’s is messier, and DataCamp’s comes with a footnote about scope.
Start with the smallest number in the report, because it’s the sharpest. A US bank with more than $7 billion in assets doubled its ChatGPT seats to 500 employees at no extra charge, paying under $7 per user against a usual rate of $20 or more. That’s not a volume discount. That’s a customer being handed seats.
DataCamp’s case shows why the top-line percentage needs reading twice. Cornelissen said OpenAI’s pricing cut costs by 80 to 90 percent, but another account of the same deal puts the Codex discount at 40 percent for models used in internal product development, provided the company also used Codex. The bigger saving, in that version, depends on extending the discount to models in products DataCamp sells. Both versions can be true at once. They just describe different scopes.
Replit’s deal, meanwhile, came with a condition Anthropic wouldn’t meet. OpenAI offered more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year, while Anthropic declined to extend Replit’s earlier discount unless it committed to spending more. Anthropic has a policy of ending discounts when customers reach their contract limits, and reporting says that policy contributed to losing the Replit business.
Why Anthropic can’t just match the price
On paper, matching a discount sounds easy. In practice, Anthropic is walking into a reported IPO, and a price war is the worst possible moment to show investors shrinking margins. An investor memo cited in the reporting says Anthropic’s growth slowed from the second quarter to the third, though it still held at 45 percent. That’s a slowdown, not a collapse, but it explains why every lost logo lands harder right now.
Money tells the same story from both sides. Anthropic’s computing costs in the second quarter were $5.6 billion, less than half of its $11.5 billion in revenue, according to the reporting. OpenAI, by contrast, has forecast that its computing spending this year will significantly exceed its revenue.
OpenAI can also point to a real cost story, not just a subsidy. Its newer Sol and Luna model lines are more efficient and cheaper to run, which is how it can cut prices without cutting quite as deep into its own economics as the headline discounts suggest. And both labs face the same outside pressure: cheaper models from Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Kimi that deliver comparable performance for a fraction of the cost. When the floor price of intelligence keeps falling, yesterday’s discount becomes tomorrow’s list price.
Replit’s messy split
Replit deserves its own section, because its story shows how these switches actually happen: loudly, then with a correction. On October 16, CEO Amjad Masad told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco that Replit was no longer working with Anthropic. He gave three reasons, in his words: “cost, partnership, and performance.” On performance, he didn’t hedge. “I think ChatGPT is better now,” he said, citing Replit’s internal benchmarks showing OpenAI’s Sol and Astra models performing better at building applications from scratch.
Then came the walk-back. Masad later said Replit “remains model agnostic” and that “OpenAI is now our preferred partner for powering Replit Agent.” A person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch the Anthropic partnership remains in place, and Replit’s documentation still lists Claude models. The honest version of the story is narrower than the onstage version, but it still favors OpenAI: Claude stays on the menu, OpenAI becomes the default, and most users never change a default.
That last point is why defaults matter more than announcements. Replit had been one of Anthropic’s top five customers, and because most users never change a default, the switch hits Anthropic’s revenue even though nobody formally “left.”
What this means for everyone else
For buyers, this is a good moment to renegotiate. If OpenAI will hand a bank 500 seats for under $7 each, your renewal conversation just got easier, whichever provider you use.
For the rest of the industry, the episode marks a turn. Frontier models are starting to behave like a commodity in the enterprise market: good enough from more than one vendor, priced aggressively, and swapped when the deal improves. That doesn’t mean the models are identical. It means procurement teams have stopped treating them as irreplaceable, and once that belief goes, it rarely comes back.
Two caveats belong in any honest account of this story. First, the discount figures come from reported negotiations, not published prices, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has confirmed the deal terms. Second, the reporting includes no statement from Anthropic, so its side is told only through the customers who left. Anthropic still keeps major customers, including some, like Cognition, Meta, and Microsoft, that are building their own technology to spend less on Claude over time.
OpenAI is buying market share right now, and it’s paying for it with margin. Whether that looks smart in a year depends on one question: do the customers it wins at $7 a seat stay when the price goes back up?
FAQ
Is OpenAI really offering 90 percent discounts to Anthropic customers? Not as a published price list. The 90 percent figure comes from reported negotiated deals: one customer said OpenAI’s pricing cut its costs by 80 to 90 percent, while other discounts reported range from more than 30 percent to around 40 percent depending on the deal.
Which companies have shifted from Anthropic to OpenAI? Rippling moved most of its coding workload to OpenAI, Replit made OpenAI the default for Replit Agent, and DataCamp said OpenAI’s pricing cut its AI costs sharply. The details come from reporting by The Information, relayed by The Decoder, and from TechCrunch’s coverage of Replit.
Why can’t Anthropic just match OpenAI’s prices? Discounting is expensive when you’re heading toward an IPO, and Anthropic has a policy of ending discounts when customers hit their contract limits. It also faces cheaper competition from Chinese labs, which puts pressure on both companies’ prices.
Does this mean Anthropic is in trouble? Not necessarily. Reports say Anthropic’s growth slowed from the second to the third quarter but still held at 45 percent, and it keeps major customers. Losing big logos right before a reported IPO is painful, but it’s not the same as losing the market.
Sources: The Information, The Decoder, TechCrunch.