Anthropic’s Margin is OpenAI’s Opportunity

Laura Bratton and Stephanie Palazzolo report that OpenAI's deep discounts are pulling customers from Anthropic ahead of Anthropic's expected IPO. At Rippling, Anthropic models did 57% of engineers' coding work in May versus 16% for OpenAI; now OpenAI is at 52% and Anthropic 18%, to cut costs (CEO Parker Conrad). Replit moved most of its AI spend to OpenAI after a discount of more than 30% on a contract worth over $100M a year (per a person familiar), after Anthropic would not extend its discount without a bigger commitment. DataCamp was offered 40% off if it also uses Codex; Atomicwork is training engineers on Codex thanks to free credits from OpenAI and Khosla Ventures; a US bank got 500 ChatGPT seats for about $40,000 a year. Anthropic spent $5.6B on compute against $11.5B revenue in Q2, while OpenAI projects compute spend above revenue this year, so its discounts buy share at negative margins. Caveats: Anthropic still grew 45% in Q3 (slowed from Q2), retook the lead on OpenRouter after Claude Opus 5.5, is roughly level with OpenAI among Ramp customers, and OpenAI says its enterprise growth accelerated.