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Cami Clark—who started what she called a ‘revolutionary porn company’ where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein—keeps a low profile but is a key adviser to the AI chief. Its coming IPO could raise trillions.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited AI leaders to a meeting in New Delhi earlier this year, security protocols allowed each executive to bring one additional person with them. Most brought colleagues, but Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei brought his wife, Cami Clark.

Clark doesn’t work at Anthropic, but she is often seen sitting in the front row while Amodei talks at events such as Davos or can be found chatting up investors at gatherings such as the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley.

She acts as a sounding board and strategic adviser for Amodei, according to people close to the company. She also brought Anthropic a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—whom she had dated—as it was getting off the ground in early 2021, some of the people said.

Despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark online​—and efforts have been made to remove references to her, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis and a person familiar with the matter.

The pair married in 2022, but Amodei’s Wikipedia page didn’t say he was married until this summer, and still doesn’t say to whom. Searches for “Dario Amodei’s wife” on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who helps run the company.

Even Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, responds to queries by saying “Dario Amodei’s marital status doesn’t seem to be clearly confirmed.”

As Anthropic hurtles toward an IPO that could top $2 trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of a CEO at the forefront of the AI industry—a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public.

It’s a remarkable rise for a woman who didn’t graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage, at age 20, to a man more than 40 years older and once declared bankruptcy. Her career has included co-founding a women-focused “free luxury porn” company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in, and starting a women’s “social dieting app” that morphed into a women’s healthcare AI company.

She made connections with powerful people, including Schmidt, whom she brought into Amodei’s orbit. The billionaire left his roles at Google and parent Alphabet in 2020 and transitioned into investing in tech startups, among other things. She also tried to persuade Schmidt to back a venture fund she would run with him to invest in Anthropic and other AI companies, although that didn’t move forward.​

Claude, the company’s chatbot, is now the chief rival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and its Claude Code tool has been embraced by millions of engineers and everyday consumers for tasks such as software writing and data analysis.

The company’s powerful Mythos model, capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, rattled markets and stoked calls by some White House officials for more federal oversight of new AI models, and Amodei himself has been a prominent voice in warning the public about the safety risks of AI.

Early partner

Clark, born in Reno, Nev., in 1979, was an entrepreneur and often interacted with the rich and powerful, as well as up-and-comers in Silicon Valley.

The most important would turn out to be Amodei, whom she started dating in 2014. Just previously, beginning in 2011 and lasting for three years, she was in a relationship with Schmidt, who was then executive chairman of Google.

Clark spent time at the group house in San Francisco where Amodei, his friend Holden Karnofsky and his sister, Daniela—who would later marry Karnofsky—lived with other key figures from the AI safety and Effective Altruism worlds. The movement, centered largely in Silicon Valley, aims to use data and reason to determine how to do the most good possible.

When they got together, Amodei was still an academic, working as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine, having earned his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Princeton. He would go on to stints at Baidu and Google before joining OpenAI in 2016.

Amodei quickly climbed the ranks, helping lead key research into “scaling laws”—the notion that intelligence increases proportionally with the increase in computing power and data used to train it.

As Amodei ascended within OpenAI, Clark joined him at company events. People who worked with him and knew the couple said she made sure his ideas were given the credit she felt they deserved.

She introduced Mira Murati, one of her closest friends, to OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, according to people familiar with the matter. Clark had worked with Murati at Leap Motion, a company that made a virtual-reality hand-tracking device. Murati joined in 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships and later became the company’s chief technology officer.

Clark also introduced Amodei to Schmidt, who became taken with the young scientist. In 2018, Schmidt visited Amodei and Clark’s apartment in San Francisco and was impressed with their ideas, Schmidt told Bloomberg.​

When tensions arose between Amodei and OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Brockman over who wielded power at the startup, Amodei, his sister and five other employees left to found Anthropic, in December 2020.

Anthropic in May 2021 announced it had raised $124 million for its Series A round of fundraising, led by Skype engineer Jaan Tallinn and including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, Jane Street founder James McClave and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, as well as Schmidt.

Clark, who wasn’t yet married to Amodei, wanted equity in the new company as well, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. In February 2021, Clark pitched Schmidt on creating a new venture fund called the Mother of AGI Fund. Its goal was to be “an elegant solution to formalize Cami’s involvement in Anthropic (Dario’s company), manage Eric’s investment,” and invest in “the AGI ecosystem,” according to a 40-page proposal.

Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Amodei and other co-founders, didn’t support the plan, according to people familiar with the matter, and it didn’t move forward.

By the end of that year, associates said they recall seeing what looked like an engagement ring on Clark’s hand, and not long afterward, the couple wed in Italy.

Clark, known for being social and outgoing, has interacted with politicians and potential investors on behalf of Amodei, chatting with them and bringing them over to meet her bookish husband at conferences and events.

Anthropic drew the ire of the Trump administration earlier this year after Amodei refused to drop restrictions on how Claude could be used by the Pentagon. The government labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk, and Pentagon partners were effectively barred from using its technology in their work with the Defense Department, a designation the company has challenged in court. The administration added restrictions on additional AI models from Anthropic in June that were later dropped. The standoff brought unwelcome attention to the company ahead of its IPO.

Clark has recently told people involved in politics that the company sees its mission as protecting America and isn’t as “woke” as its detractors might think it is, according to people familiar with the matter.

At the Sun Valley conference in July, where she spent much of the week by her husband’s side, she had lunch with Ivanka Trump, a friend, and chatted with Jared Kushner, whom Amodei had approached earlier in the year to invest, people familiar with the matter said.

‘Revolutionary porn company’

Clark’s early years show a young woman hustling to succeed at a range of businesses, many she founded, including a porn company targeting women.

In 1999, at the age of 20, she married 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, who had designed buildings including the city’s Atlantis Casino Resort. They divorced three years later. On a now-defunct personal website, Clark said she dropped out of architecture school in 1999.

Property records show she moved to San Francisco in 1999 and spent a decade there before spending time in New York and Los Angeles. In that period she worked for a mortgage brokerage company called OLG Financial. While raising money for a later venture, she would describe herself as the “co-founder of OLG Financial Corp.” The company’s 2005 incorporation documents don’t include her name.

A lender foreclosed on her San Francisco apartment in 2007, and two years later she filed for bankruptcy, according to property records and court filings.

Around 2010, she and Michelle Capocefalo started Eddice, which described itself as a “revolutionary porn company.” Named for Eddice Munson, Clark’s maternal grandmother, it aimed to emphasize sex positivity in a male-oriented porn industry, and carried the tagline: “intellectually promiscuous.”

It included a blog that gathered content with titles such as “Lady Porn Day” and “Orgasm, Inc.” It also highlighted the work of intellectuals such as pundit Clay Shirky and marketing expert and author Seth Godin.

At one point, after alerting readers that its PayPal account had been frozen, Clark’s company announced on its website that it was “crowdsourcing” funding. “We are raising $350,000 to produce EDDICE.COM and our first four films, AMERICAN GIRL IN PARIS.”

In one of her pitches, part of which was reviewed by the Journal, Clark said her resume included “real estate + entrepreneurial investments” as well as “distribution + brand strategy consultant, interior design/architectural background.”​

Jeffrey Epstein’s world

Clark and Capocefalo attended the 2011 Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich, a tech, media, science and arts salon that executives often stop by on their way to the World Economic Forum in Davos. That year, the keynote speech was given by Schmidt, then still CEO of Google.

Little is publicly known about the three-year relationship between Clark and Schmidt, who remains married to another woman. Schmidt was also an investor in one of Clark’s startups, which focused on women’s health, according to people familiar with the matter.

At the Munich conference, Clark and Capocefalo met John Brockman, a literary agent of scientific books, who introduced Epstein to academics and Silicon Valley elites, according to Epstein documents recently released by the Justice Department.

John Brockman introduced the women to Epstein that March.​ Writing that he was headed to a Wired magazine party where Brockman was the guest of honor, he told Epstein, “You should connect for dinner with my girls—Cami and Michelle. They’re in LA raising money for porn movie aimed at women’s market.” He then shared the website for Eddice.​

Brockman concluded the March 3 email by noting a birthday party being thrown for him that Saturday, saying Clark and Capocefalo would be there. Clark followed up the email soon after, writing to Epstein, “Hello Jeffrey! We would love to have dinner with you this evening.” She sent him her cellphone number. John Brockman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The next week, Clark sent Epstein an email with an attachment. “We thought you and the ladies might enjoy the script/treatment for our first 4 films, American Girl in Paris. A little nsfw,” she wrote.

A year later, she reached back out to Epstein. At first he didn’t remember her. She replied that they had been introduced by John Brockman a year earlier. “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?”

Epstein replied: “Yes, a loud gong.”

Clark joked back. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us.”

She pitched him on investing in her company, saying they had just hired someone from Oprah Winfrey’s company and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst, the media company behind shows like “Punk’d.” “Are you still interested?”

Epstein, then a registered sex offender, replied, “Can’t do sex TV.”

She pivoted to pitching him another business, a “social dieting app + website geared toward women” that would combine data from Fitbits and other health monitoring devices, user-entered data about nutrition, menstrual cycles, mood and location, and the ability to share it all, Facebook-style.

Their interaction continued over two years, the government released Epstein files show. Clark invited Epstein to her and Capocefalo’s housewarming party in Manhattan, and connected with him as friends on LinkedIn.

In 2013, Epstein received an automated note from LinkedIn that he should congratulate Clark for her new role as CEO of Female Algorithm Technologies. Traces of it online are scant, except for a Tumblr account with the edgy aesthetic that combined photos of nude women, a portrait of Steve Jobs with an early Macintosh, and all-caps mottos like Great Minds F— Each Other, using the full expletive, and “Let’s Make Lots of Money.”

Even after the increase, it still charges far less than U.S. AI players and Chinese peers

China’s DeepSeek is hiking prices for its flagship V4 models amid fierce competition among artificial intelligence players, though its latest prices remain well below its rivals’.

New peak-hour pricing will be over four times higher than current levels, according to a post on its official website on Thursday. The increase will take effect on Aug. 16.

For DeepSeek-v4-pro model, users will pay $3.96 for 1 million output tokens during peak hours, and half that during off-peak hours. That’s up from $0.87 per million tokens previously. Tokens are the units of text that AI model process, and the basis on which they charge for their services.

The DeepSeek-v4-flash model will charge $1.32 per 1 million output tokens during peak hours, and half that during off-peak hours, the post said.

Even after the increase, DeepSeek still charges far less than U.S. AI players and Chinese peers. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, for example, charges $15.00 per 1 million output tokens.

DeepSeek is in talks with prospective investors for a new round of fundraising after raising more than $7.4 billion in June. The company is preparing to list shares in Shanghai as early as the second quarter of next year, the Wall Street Journal reported.

There Aren’t Enough Ships to Handle China’s Booming Car Exports

As demand slumps at home, Chinese cars are flooding other markets—and testing the shipping industry

A surge in car exports from China is outstripping the capacity of the global shipping industry, booking out specialized car carriers years ahead.

The average annual rate to charter a large car carrier reached $70,000 a day in June, up from $42,500 at the end of last year.

Some automakers are resorting to shipping vehicles inside containers, while BYD has launched its own fleet of eight car carriers.

China’s auto factories are building so many cars for export that the global shipping industry can’t keep up.

Specialized car carriers, essentially floating parking garages, are booked out years ahead to export cars from Chinese factories. Rates to charter ships are up 65% this year on the surging demand to move vehicles out of China.

Chinese carmakers are flooding foreign markets because of fierce competition between more than 100 domestic auto brands, overproduction and a sluggish economy. Now, the shipping industry is navigating skyrocketing rates and scarce capacity.

Some automakers are so desperate to get vehicles to Europe, Australia and Latin America they are squeezing them inside shipping containers more commonly used to transport furniture, clothes and electronics.

“The strength of the market in the shipping segment is amazing, and it is due to the unprecedented growth of exports out of China,” said Lasse Kristoffersen, chief executive of the world’s largest car-carrier fleet, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, on an earnings call earlier this year.

Carriers have gone on a record buying spree in recent years to meet demand. Kristoffersen said the global car-carrier fleet has grown by about 40%, but still can’t meet China’s needs.

China exported just under 600,000 cars and vans in 2019, according to research group Mobility Global. This year, the group forecasts China could ship up to 10 million vehicles.

Registrations in the European Union for China’s SAIC Motor 600104 -0.49%decrease; red down pointing triangle jumped 19% and BYD’s 002594 -0.93%decrease; red down pointing triangle more than doubled in the first half of 2026, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. Meanwhile, legacy rivals stagnated: Stellantis gained just 6%, Volkswagen edged up 2.6%, and Renault fell 4.2%.

“You’ve got China moving from being insignificant to being the world’s largest vehicle exporter in only a five-year period,” said Andreas Enger, chief executive of Norwegian car carrier Höegh Autoliners.

The boom has pushed ocean freight rates for cars to double their prepandemic levels, Enger said.

Industry executives had expected vessel charter rates to slump this year due to a big influx of new ships entering service. Companies ordered billions of dollars worth of car carriers between 2022 and 2025 as consumer spending on vehicles surged and Chinese exports started their rapid rise. Demand for space pushed charter rates in late 2023 and early 2024 to a peak of $115,000 a day.

Instead, rates are soaring again as carriers struggle to meet demand, largely because of Chinese auto exports. The average annual rate to charter a large car carrier hit $70,000 a day in June, according to shipbroker Clarksons, up from $42,500 at the end of last year.

With a handful of exceptions, Chinese cars aren’t exported to the U.S., thanks to high tariffs and software restrictions tied to national security concerns. Yet cheaper and more technologically advanced battery-electric and hybrid cars from brands like BYD and SAIC Motor haven’t only overtaken longtime Western brands in China, they also are increasingly doing so in countries like the U.K., Brazil and Germany.

Tu Le, managing director of advisory firm Sino Auto Insights, said the Chinese auto industry’s aggressive export plans equate to a “pressure release valve” as sales at home slow. In the first half of 2026, car sales in China fell more than 20% from the same year-earlier period, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

“When you go to Germany, you don’t have 20 other Chinese car brands that are elbowing you to get that one sale, like you have in Shanghai,” Le said.

Automakers prefer to ship on car carriers because driving cars on and off vessels is cheaper than other shipping methods and carries less risk of vehicle damage, said Eric Dessupoiu, vice president of finished vehicle logistics at France’s Ceva Logistics. Still, automakers that have no other choice will move cars in containers, Dessupoiu said.

Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s Kristoffersen said during an earnings presentation on Tuesday that up to four million vehicles are exported from China each year in containers or other alternatives to car carriers.

Shipping cars in containers isn’t new; it just isn’t usually done at scale to move thousands of cars. That changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand to move vehicles outstripped the supply of ships. Christoph Seitz, global vice president of finished vehicles for DP World, a Dubai-based freight forwarder, said some Western automakers were skeptical of putting cars in boxes, but Chinese automakers didn’t flinch. “They immediately went, ‘We need more capacity,’” Seitz said.

A car being shipped by container must first be taken to a facility near a port, where it is loaded into a box and then lifted by crane onto a ship. That process must be repeated, in reverse, at the destination port.

Seitz said shipping cars in containers has become so popular that major container-shipping companies such as Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk and Switzerland’s Mediterranean Shipping Co. have started selling their services directly to automakers.

The export supply is now so immense that Chinese automakers are expanding into the shipping sector, too. BYD launched its first dedicated car carrier in 2024 and now has a fleet of eight vessels. The automaker didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mike Ashley promises ‘Dunkirk spirit’ as he barrels into the luxury industry

High street billionaire claims Frasers has moved on from its discounting ways as it swoops on Harvey Nichols

As Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group sealed the acquisition of Harvey Nichols this week, a question was left hanging over its luxurious Knightsbridge department store: can a man who built a fortune from the bargain bins of Sports Direct finally change his discounting ways?

The roughly £40mn purchase of Harvey Nichols via a pre-pack administration furthers Ashley’s push beyond trainers and tracksuits and into the rarefied world of luxury.

As well as building stakes in British luxury brands Burberry and Mulberry, Frasers last year purchased upmarket US fashion chain The Webster. With the addition of Harvey Nichols, Frasers now controls a portfolio of more than 90 luxury department stores, making it a distribution channel that many brands may no longer be able to ignore.

The UK retail group also launched a takeover offer for Hugo Boss in June. While it appears destined to fail, Frasers’ more than 30 per cent holding leaves it well placed to influence the German fashion group’s operations.

“We’ll show them a bit of Dunkirk spirit — quote me, I don’t care,” Ashley told the FT in an interview from his home in Mallorca.

The flurry of dealmaking has raised questions over how a hard-nosed businessman known for piling it high and selling it cheap will adapt to an industry based around exclusivity and discretion.

Ashley had his start buying brands 30 years ago with a deal for Donnay. He outsourced the tennis brand’s production and used the savings to discount it heavily in Sports Direct, aggressively undercutting Nike and Adidas and setting the blueprint for the retailer’s growth.

The billionaire indicated, however, that he will not bulldoze his way into the luxury market in a similar fashion.

“It’s completely different. It’s totally ridiculous to compare the two. Luxury brands have to restrict [the supply of] products, they like scarcity and actually move it [the price] upwards,” he said.

Ashley said that moving into luxury was a “natural progression” for Frasers and that the strategic shift, which has been accompanied by broader international expansion, was made possible by his long-term perspective as majority owner of a business he founded in 1982.

He added that other bosses would not be able to countenance similar moves without considering how it might “ruin their valuation” but he was not bound by the same constraints.

“It’s OK, because I’m not selling [my shares],” he said. “When the team gives me ideas I’m saying ‘go for it’ — there’s an open door.”

Much of the apprehension around Frasers’ arrival on the luxury scene stems from its brief and chaotic ownership of Matches Fashion, which ended with Ashley’s group calling in administrators to the online luxury retailer three months after buying it in December 2023.

That decision left hundreds of Matches’ suppliers, including Prada, Gucci and Burberry, on course to receive approximately a penny for every pound they were owed.

Lucy Delius, founder of the eponymous fine jewellery brand and a former Matches supplier, said that if she were stocked in Harvey Nichols she would sever ties with the retailer “immediately”.

“Mike Ashley doesn’t care about brands, he just cares about making money — which is business. But after what happened with Matches, I can’t say Frasers is a great partner for an independent brand like mine,” she said.

Frasers, which recouped all of its investment in Matches, pulled the plug on the business after falling out with its management, according to two people close to the situation.

Ashley said that Matches was in a worse financial position than Frasers anticipated and that “it should have been shut down years ago — it was trading insolvent. Sometimes the hole is too big”.

Michael Murray, Ashley’s son-in-law, was promoted to chief executive at Frasers four years ago. He has been leading the group’s attempts to move upmarket by refurbishing stores and adopting a more collaborative relationship with brands.

Frasers’s 36-year-old chief said the company was “building something different in luxury”.

“Our ambition is to create a scaled luxury ecosystem where brands can grow with us,” Murray said. “Frasers is becoming a genuinely strategic partner to the world’s best luxury brands and helps them reach their next generation of customers.”

Ashley concedes that his fitness-obsessed son-in-law — who he describes as “the pretty boy” — is a more acceptable face to luxury brands than that of a man who once described himself as “a power drinker”.

“I’m Marmite — I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” said Ashley, who has stepped down from Frasers’ board. He added that Murray makes the final call on investments.

Harvey Nichols has been on the high street tycoon’s radar for years but it comes into Frasers’ ownership at a low ebb. Its pre-tax losses widened to £49mn from £34mn last year, prompting Ashley to claim the business is in a “death spiral”. Frasers warned on Thursday that it would likely close some of the chain’s seven stores.

“Mike always reminds me of people who try to win ‘Monopoly’ by building up the crappy brown properties,” said Nick Bubb, an independent retail analyst. “I don’t think that buying up bankrupt businesses on the cheap is a recipe for success in this market. I’d rather see him paying up to buy some dark-blue properties.”

Ashley is pushing into luxury in the midst of an industry downturn that is entering its third year. Revenues at Frasers’ so-called premium lifestyle business — which includes luxury fashion chain Flannels, Jack Wills, House of Fraser and Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes — fell by 6.9 per cent to £975.7mn last year.

Murray said the performance reflected a “long journey” at Flannels, which sells brands including Coach and Balenciaga, mainly in provincial towns and cities. The retailer trades from more than 50 stores in locations including Blackpool, Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton.

Ashley remains undeterred. In July, Frasers disclosed it had built a 4.2 per cent stake in Burberry, worth about £170mn, via derivatives. That added to a pre-existing 37 per cent stake in Mulberry.

He said that he was driven to invest in Burberry — which is stocked in Flannels — because of a belief in the turnaround being led by chief executive Joshua Schulman.

“Sometimes I buy because I have faith. I’m very happy with it. There’s noise about how much the chief executive earns — I want him to earn even more, pay him more! Because if he earns more, does more, my shares are worth more. It’s simple,” Ashley said.

Historically, people close to Frasers have said the company buys stakes in other brand owners as a means of gaining better access to their products. However, a person who has advised the group said that when Ashley’s stake buying works, he benefits on multiple fronts.

“If he does well with Boss, he does well both as an investor and for Frasers in terms of gaining more access to product, which also boosts Boss sales,” the person said. Boss is Frasers’ biggest-selling non-sportswear brand, according to a person close to the company.

Frasers’ offer for the company came after it built a position via share options that was set to take it above the 30 per cent threshold at which it would be forced to make a bid. Only 7.3 per cent of Boss’s other investors took Frasers up on its offer that was pitched at just a 4 per cent premium.

“I want more [Boss] shares, so I’m going to keep buying them. I don’t care about owning all of it,” he said. “I believe Boss has the potential in the medium- to long-term. I just think it’s very cheap.”

Ashley said he builds stakes in other companies because it is “just my wheelhouse” and not an extension of a penchant for gambling that saw him initiate a game of spoof to settle the bill for advisers’ fees on Sports Direct’s IPO.

“This is genuinely investing to get the company. I want to own a bit of the business,” he said. “I’d be buying SpaceX or Bitcoin if I wanted to gamble.”

US groups release cheaper models after new challenges to their trillion-dollar ambitions

Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals.

The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe.

OpenAI recently said that it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model”, by 80 per cent. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, touting the system’s “frontier intelligence . . . at half the price” of Fable 5, the company’s most capable model.

The moves have helped decrease prices that customers are paying for models from leading US labs by almost a quarter since mid-July, according to Silicon Data’s token price index. Tokens are the units of data processed by language models and are used to calculate many customers’ bills.

The cuts mark a shift for US AI groups that make proprietary “closed” models which have, until now, competed heavily on performance. Increasingly capable “open” Chinese models — which can be freely downloaded and tweaked by developers — have contributed to pressure on prices.

The moves also come as OpenAI and Anthropic plot initial public offerings at trillion-dollar valuations while investors seek evidence that the industry’s vast spending on AI can generate returns.

Corporate AI users face cost pressures as Anthropic and OpenAI shift some enterprise customers away from flat subscriptions and towards usage-based billing, under which companies pay according to the computational resources they consume.

Some businesses have responded to a rise in bills by imposing caps on AI usage or testing cheaper alternatives. Companies such as DoorDash and Airbnb have said they have started to use Chinese-made models in an effort to rein in bills.

That shift has coincided with a flurry of releases from Chinese labs that have narrowed the performance gap with leading US models, raising concerns in the US tech industry that American developers could lose customers even as they spend heavily to maintain their technological edge.

AI labs offer a range of models with different capabilities and prices, with costs varying further according to the version of a model and the “effort” settings used. Customers are typically charged for input tokens, used to measure data fed into a model, and output tokens, which measure what it generates in response.

The latest price cuts from US labs apply to mid-tier products and make them more competitive with Chinese offerings. OpenAI, for example, cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna from $1 to $0.20 per mn input tokens and from $6 to $1.20 per mn output tokens.

Anthropic launched Opus 5 at $5 per mn input tokens and $25 per mn output tokens — half the price of its Fable 5 model. This week, the company called off a planned rise in prices for its Sonnet 5 model, which had been due to take effect from September.

Headline token prices do not provide a straightforward comparison between AI models, however. More capable models can sometimes complete a task using fewer tokens or with fewer attempts, meaning a model that appears more expensive based on the headline price of tokens can ultimately cost less.

Additionally, most can operate at different “effort” settings, which vary the computing power used to answer a question and can affect both performance and the ultimate cost of completing a task.

Artificial Analysis, which benchmarks models across areas including maths, science, coding and reasoning, found Anthropic’s Opus 5 at “medium” effort delivered similar performance and cost per task to Moonshot’s Kimi K3 at “max” effort. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna at “max” effort performed similarly to DeepSeek’s V4 Flash at “max”, but cost just under twice as much per task.

Anthropic and OpenAI declined to comment.

A person close to Anthropic said Opus 5’s pricing below its flagship Fable 5 was how the start-up’s “family of models is built, so there’s no connection to competitors”.

Mantas Lukauskas, AI tech lead at Hostinger, a website hosting provider that has used large language models since 2020, noted that prices for the very best models were “flat to rising”.

He added that the recent pricing changes are the “first real test” of whether groups such as Anthropic and OpenAI can protect the cost of their most advanced offerings: “The US labs have cut the middle and are defending the top.”

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