Cheap AI could derail OpenAI and Anthropic's IPOs

This earnings season, the cost of AI started showing up in the numbers. Meta , Shopify , Spotify , and Pinterest all flagged rising AI and inference costs as a drag on margins. Shopify said economies of scale were "partially offset by increased LLM costs." This is the bill coming due for the pricing model that underpins OpenAI's and Anthropic's expected IPO valuations, both projected north of $800 billion. Those numbers assume OpenAI and Anthropic will hold their market share and pricing power — that competitors can't easily catch up, and that enterprise customers will keep paying a premium because there's no real alternative. But increasingly the data is pointing the other way. Cutting-edge AI is becoming abundant and cheap. Chinese labs are charging a fraction of what American labs do for comparable work, while a wave of Western challengers — Nvidia , Cohere, Reflection, Mistral — are building cheaper, smaller, more efficient alternatives for enterprises that won't touch a Chinese model. By the time OpenAI and Anthropic file their prospectuses, with OpenAI's confidential filing coming as soon as this week, the central premise of their valuations may already be gone. The cost gap is wide and getting wider. Enterprise AI budgets have surged. Some 45% of companies surveyed by cloud cost firm CloudZero said they spent more than $100,000 a month on AI in 2025, up from 20% the year before. Where that money goes increasingly matters. …