[FLASH] OpenAI and Anthropic cut model prices as Chinese rivals take the low end; DeepSeek raises its own
On 2026-08-14 OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing from $1.00 to $0.20 per million input tokens, an ~80% reduction, and Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5 at $5 per million input and $25 per million output, roughly half its Fable 5 tier; Google had cut Gemini 3.7 Flash to $0.75 per million input through year-end on 08-13. Reporting attributes the moves to lower-cost Chinese competitors winning inference-bill-sensitive enterprise workloads, with Moonshot's Kimi K3 quoted at $15 and DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.87 per million output against Fable's $50. DeepSeek moved the other way the same day, launching V4 Pro while raising API prices by up to 1,100% on some workloads. Watch whether the frontier labs' unit economics, not their capability lead, becomes the reported constraint.