Leading US AI laboratories reduced their inference prices by nearly 25% between mid-July and mid-August, according to Silicon Data analysis reported by the Financial Times. OpenAI cut the price of its mid-tier model GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% on July 30, while Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its predecessor. This price reduction is primarily driven by Chinese providers like DeepSeek and Moonshot, which offer comparable models at significantly lower prices. GPT-4-class performance costs dropped from over $20 per million tokens in late 2022 to under $1 per million tokens by mid-2026, representing a decline of more than 95%. This development benefits enterprise adoption but undermines the financial models that justified the high valuations of US laboratories.
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