OpenAI recently released its new flagship model, GPT-5, which, while it caused some disappointment among users and forced the company to roll back access to GPT-4o, has one major advantage: cost. As TechCrunch reports, this could spark a new price war between AI companies.
The top-tier GPT-5 API costs $1.25 for 1 million input tokens and $10 for 1 million output tokens. These prices are in line with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which increases the price after 200,000 requests, so active users end up paying more.
However, under these conditions, OpenAI is ahead of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1, which costs significantly more — $15 for 1 million input tokens and $75 for 1 million output tokens. This model is very popular among programmers, in particular due to its availability in the Cursor and Claude Code services.
GPT-5 is currently priced competitively, even compared to other OpenAI models, as it is cheaper than GPT-4o, which has been much more well-received than the company's latest product. One of the developers featured in the OpenAI presentation video, Simon Wilson, said that "the pricing is aggressively competitive compared to other vendors."
As a result, active discussions have begun online about whether other companies will follow OpenAI in reducing prices. Currently, artificial intelligence is already an unprofitable business, spending many times more money than it receives. Such an approach by the ChatGPT developer could potentially even harm an industry that is trying to make a profit.