Startups and tech giants wage AI price war as inference costs spiral out of control

The AI Price War Is Here, Piling Pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

Enterprises are shifting to model routing: DeepSeek usage rose from 1% to 17% on Vercel in a month, with 95% cost savings routing simple tasks to cheap open-source alternatives. OpenAI and Anthropic face margin pressure as the market learns that competitive advantage lies in multi-model orchestration for cost-per-task optimization, not expensive single models.