Chinese AI drives price competition among US labs

Chinese AI firms are pushing pricing pressure on U.S. labs as customers shop around. The report highlights that OpenAI cut fees by 80% for its lightweight “Luna” model, while Anthropic released a model that approaches the performance of its most powerful system at half the price. Some Chinese companies are moving the other direction, raising fees as businesses and developers adopt their open-source offerings. DeepSeek said last week it plans a “significant increase” in prices for programmers, and a Beijing venue—AGI Bar in Zhongguancun—offers free access to DeepSeek V4 Flash for patrons by self-hosting the model on Nvidia workstations.