VendorsOCT 25, 2026

OpenAI poaches Anthropic's top accounts with 30–90% discounts weeks before IPO

The Information says Replit took a 30%-plus cut on a $100M-plus contract, Rippling's coding mix flipped from 57% Anthropic to 52% OpenAI, and DataCamp's costs fell 80–90%.

BY GRETA REINHART · ENTERPRISE SAAS

OpenAI is cutting prices by 30% to 90% to pry Anthropic’s biggest API accounts loose, according to a report in The Information by Laura Bratton and Stephanie Palazzolo. The timing isn’t incidental. Anthropic is weeks from a public offering, and OpenAI is turning its competitor’s roadshow into a procurement event.

The specifics are unusually concrete. Replit, per a person familiar with the deal, took more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million annually after Anthropic declined to extend an earlier discount without a higher spend commitment. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad told The Information that his coding workload has flipped: Anthropic ran 57% of it in May against OpenAI’s 16%, and now OpenAI handles 52% to Anthropic’s 18%. Conrad attributed the reversal to cost. DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen says his roughly 200-person company secured a 40% discount conditional on adopting Codex instead of OpenCode or Claude Code, and that total costs fell 80–90% after the switch. One US bank with more than $7 billion in assets doubled its ChatGPT footprint to 500 seats at under $7 per user, versus the standard $20-plus.

The Decoder notes OpenAI can afford some of this because its Sol and Luna model lines run on more efficient infrastructure, so part of the discount is real margin compression rather than loss-leader pricing. The rest is a bet on switching costs.

This is what commoditization looks like inside an enterprise sales motion. Chinese models from DeepSeek and Kimi are adding pressure from below, delivering comparable performance for a fraction of the cost, per The Decoder. An investor memo cited by The Information shows Anthropic’s growth decelerating from Q2 to Q3, even as its $16.8 billion Q3 print framed the IPO story.

Neither company has confirmed the terms. They don’t have to. The customers are talking, and they’re saying the same thing: the floor is still falling.

Sources

About the author

Greta Reinhart

ENTERPRISE SAAS

Greta Reinhart tracks the enterprise software stack from San Francisco — data platforms, AI bundling, seat pricing, and channel checks across the largest SaaS vendors. She files on go-to-market shifts, packaging changes, and quarterly enterprise reads.