The Pulse
OpenAI Cuts Prices to Win Replit and Rippling Work From Anthropic
OpenAI is offering steep discounts as it competes with Anthropic for enterprise AI spending. Replit shifted most of its AI budget to OpenAI, while Rippling’s coding workload moved sharply toward OpenAI models.
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
At Rippling, OpenAI models now handle 52% of the coding work done by hundreds of engineers, up from 16% in May. Anthropic’s share fell over the same period, from 57% to 18%, as the HR software company looked to cut costs. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad said OpenAI proved cheaper. The shift offers a clear example of how price is moving corporate AI workloads between providers.
Rippling’s coding work changes hands
Conrad described a broader pullback from Anthropic among companies weighing their AI bills. “Anyone who is smart and sophisticated about this over the summer was trying to dramatically cut back from Anthropic and switch to other tools,” he said. He did not provide further details about Rippling’s spending or the cost difference between providers.
The figures track the share of coding work handled by each company’s models at Rippling, not a general measure of enterprise market share. They show a substantial change inside one large customer, but do not establish that discounts alone caused every workload to move. The Information reported that Rippling was seeking lower costs and found OpenAI’s pricing more competitive.
Replit moved most of its AI spending
Replit, a coding platform, shifted most of its AI spending from Anthropic to OpenAI in recent months after OpenAI offered a discount of more than 30% on model prices, according to a person familiar with the deal cited by The Information. The contract was valued at more than $100 million a year. Replit had planned to continue using Anthropic, but the person said Anthropic would not extend an earlier discount unless the startup committed to higher spending.
The switch does not mean Replit has abandoned Claude. The Information reported that the company changed its models in a matter of hours and its products over several days, suggesting that some developers can move workloads between providers without a long technical transition. The report also said newer OpenAI models had become more competitive with Anthropic’s for software development, according to app developers.
DataCamp’s 40% offer could cut costs further
OpenAI offered workforce-training company DataCamp a 40% discount on models used internally to develop products, CEO Jonathan Cornelissen told The Information. The offer came with a condition: DataCamp would also use Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, rather than a competitor such as Claude Code or OpenCode. The company was negotiating to extend the discount to models powering an application it sells to customers.
Cornelissen said the broader arrangement could deliver much larger savings than the discount alone suggests, because OpenAI’s models already cost less than Anthropic’s before the markdown. “We’re looking at an 80% to 90% decrease in costs,” he said. “It’s huge.” That figure is a projected reduction in DataCamp’s costs if the broader pricing change applies, not an across-the-board discount offered by OpenAI.
Discounts do not settle the model contest
OpenAI’s offers can buy it a larger share of customer workloads, but the price cuts may weigh on margins. The Information reported that the discounts could add to OpenAI’s already heavy computing costs. Anthropic, meanwhile, has regained ground among users of OpenRouter, a service that gives customers access to multiple models: after OpenAI briefly took the lead, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 returned it to the top spot and drew about twice as much use as OpenAI models over the week covered in the report.
A separate deal shows the same pricing pressure at work on existing accounts. An executive at a U.S. bank with more than $7 billion in assets told The Information that OpenAI doubled the bank’s ChatGPT seats to 500 without increasing its annual contract price of about $40,000. That works out to less than $7 a month per employee, compared with a typical listed price above $20, according to the report. The bank had been considering moving some work to Claude before OpenAI changed the terms.