# OpenAI and Anthropic cut LLM prices up to 80% within months

> Original title: OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?

- Source: Hacker News · AI (150+ points)
- Published: 2026-10-25T21:11:31.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/swrpyi9asnrynobrv5plro441
- Original: https://minimaxir.com/2026/10/cheap-llms/

## Summary

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna's price by 80% to $0.20 / $1.20 / $0.02 per million tokens on July 30, 2026, and Anthropic made its temporary Sonnet 5 launch pricing of $2 / $10 / $0.20 permanent on August 10. The author says the two companies traded price cuts in response to each other, with cache read costs making up 96% to 99% of agentic coding token spend. Models are increasingly interchangeable, and the author argues competitor pressure from open-weight models like DeepSeek V4 Flash explains the drops.