AT&T has begun shifting significant portions of its artificial intelligence workloads away from Anthropic’s proprietary models toward open-source and open-weight alternatives, achieving cost reductions of 80% to 90% on targeted applications.
The company currently processes roughly 45 billion AI tokens per day. About 25% of that volume already runs on open models, primarily for functions like network management. AT&T’s goal is to push that number to somewhere between 70% and 80% over time.
The math behind the migration
AT&T says the shift has already saved millions of dollars, though the company hasn’t disclosed a precise total figure.
The savings aren’t just coming from swapping one model for a cheaper one. AT&T has built a proprietary “cache-aware AI Gateway” that handles intelligent prompt routing, essentially directing each query to the most cost-effective model capable of handling it well.
