OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman has indicated that the company is prepared to significantly reduce the prices of its latest artificial intelligence models amid growing competition from US rival Anthropic and rapidly advancing, lower-cost Chinese AI alternatives.

In a social media post on Tuesday, July 15th, 2026, Altman highlighted that OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5.6 Sol is already priced at half the cost of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. He added that OpenAI would be "happy to deliver at one-quarter of the price."

OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Sol last week, setting prices at US$5 per million input tokens and US$30 per million output tokens. In comparison, Fable 5, the consumer version of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, is priced at US$10 per million input tokens and US$50 per million output tokens. AI tokens are the basic units used by these models to process and generate information, supporting tasks from chatbot conversations to high-quality video production.

Altman’s comments come after Anthropic gained recognition this year among global enterprise customers and software developers, particularly with its Claude Code AI coding tool. Meanwhile, Chinese AI developers have exerted additional pricing pressure by driving down costs for frontier models throughout the year.

Despite OpenAI lowering prices for its GPT-5.6 series compared to previous products, its flagship and mid-tier models remain more expensive than major Chinese rivals.

Sources