OpenAI Is Slashing Prices to Steal Anthropic's Biggest Customers, and Replit and Rippling Already Switched

OpenAI has found a blunt way to win back the enterprise coding market: make it cheaper. Some of the companies that made Anthropic the favorite model provider for software teams are now moving their work to OpenAI, and the reason they give is price.

The shift was reported by The Information, and the numbers come from customer executives and a person familiar with the deals. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has confirmed them.

Rippling flipped in five months

The clearest example is Rippling, the HR software maker. CEO Parker Conrad said that in May, Anthropic models handled 57 percent of the coding work done by the company's hundreds of engineers, while OpenAI handled 16 percent.

That split has since reversed. Today 52 percent of Rippling's coding tasks run on OpenAI models and 18 percent on Anthropic. Conrad put it down to cost: OpenAI turned out to be cheaper.

Replit took a nine figure deal

Replit made a bigger move. According to a source, it shifted most of its AI spending from Anthropic to OpenAI in a deal worth more than $100 million a year, after OpenAI offered a discount of more than 30 percent. Anthropic had stopped a discount it had been giving Replit.

On October 17, Replit CEO Amjad Masad said the company had stopped working with Anthropic. He pointed to cost, the quality of the partnership and benchmark wins for OpenAI's Sol and Astra models. A person familiar with the relationship disputed the split at the time.

Smaller buyers get the same treatment

The discounts reach well below the unicorn tier. DataCamp, a training company with roughly 200 employees and a heavy Anthropic buyer, got a 40 percent discount from OpenAI on one condition: it had to adopt Codex instead of rival tools like OpenCode or Claude Code. CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI's pricing cut his costs by 80 to 90 percent.

A US bank with more than $7 billion in assets saw its ChatGPT seats doubled to 500 employees at no extra charge. It now pays under $7 per user, against the usual $20 or more.

Paying for share, but also getting cheaper

Part of this is OpenAI buying market share with its own margins. But not all of it. The company has also delivered real price cuts through its Sol and Luna model lines, built on more efficient models and infrastructure.

That puts Anthropic in an awkward spot. Its growth slowed from the second quarter to the third, according to an investor memo, just as it heads toward a public listing. Its finances are already under scrutiny after its IPO filing showed it lost $80 billion in six months, which makes a price war an expensive fight to join.

Both companies are also squeezed from below. Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi deliver comparable performance for a fraction of the cost.

When two frontier models are close in quality, the cheaper one wins the contract. Rippling, Replit and DataCamp have already shown which way that goes, and Anthropic now has to decide whether to match OpenAI's prices or let more of its best accounts walk.

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