OpenAI recently announced its new flagship model, GPT-5, launching it with unprecedentedly competitive pricing.
The move came just days after the company released two other models to the public, putting competitors in a difficult position and raising questions about the start of a long-awaited price war in the artificial intelligence sector.
In a post on "X," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared GPT-5 to be "the best model in the world."
While press reports suggest it holds only a slight edge in some benchmarks over rival models from Google and Anthropic, its true strength lies in programming and, most notably, its pricing.
In this context, Altman expressed his satisfaction with the pricing structure the company was able to achieve.
GPT-5 Pricing
The GPT-5 API is priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
With these figures, OpenAI positions its model in direct competition with Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro.
The biggest blow, however, was dealt to Anthropic. Its Claude Opus 4.1 model starts at $15 for inputs and $75 for outputs—a significant gap that gives OpenAI a clear advantage.
Reaction to the New Pricing
Positive feedback from developers and experts with early access to the model began to surface almost immediately.
Developer Simon Willison, who was featured in the company's launch video, noted in his review that the "pricing is aggressively competitive with other providers."
Meanwhile, Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, highlighted a crucial point, stating that GPT-5 is even cheaper than its predecessor, GPT-4o. He added, "The intelligence-per-dollar just keeps going up."
Descriptions like "price killer" quickly spread across social media, signaling a new strategic direction for OpenAI.
This aggressive maneuver raises a fundamental question: Will companies like Anthropic and Google follow suit and lower their prices? If they do, we are indeed witnessing the beginning of a full-scale price war in the large language model market.
Yet, this price drop comes at a seemingly contradictory moment. Tech giants are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in building data centers and infrastructure to support the soaring demand for AI—investments that typically drive costs in only one direction: upward.
For instance, OpenAI has a contract with Oracle valued at $30 billion annually. Meta plans to spend $72 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, while Alphabet has allocated $85 billion for the same purpose.
Given these massive figures, it may be premature for smaller companies to celebrate lower prices based on a single move by OpenAI.
What is certain, however, is that the company has thrown a stone into still waters. The question of how competitors will react now hangs in the air, waiting for an answer in the coming months.
