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- As companies move to rein in AI spending, OpenAI and Anthropic may have to reckon with slowing growth.
- Open-source models are emerging as cheaper alternatives, and tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all proposing offerings focused more on efficiency.
- “Some of their largest enterprise customers may start limiting their out-of-control token spend,” said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria, regarding concerns around OpenAI and Anthropic.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) takes a group photo with AI company leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (C) and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (R) at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026.Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
Flo Crivello’s expenses were out of whack, and there was only one way to get them under control.
Earlier this month, the 34-year-old CEO of AI startup Lindy switched his company off of Anthropic’s Claude models, moving 100% of its traffic to DeepSeek, a Chinese company that makes cheaper, open-weight alternatives.
“We did it, and you could see that cost curve go down, like, crash to the ground,” Crivello said in an interview from his company’s San Francisco headquarters. He said the decision will save Lindy millions of dollars within months, though he still expects the roughly 25-person company to spend more on AI than payroll.
“It’s a matter of survival for the business,” Crivello said. “That’s all it is.”
Crivello, who previously spent almost five years at Uber, is among a growing crop of founders and executives across the U.S. trying to rein in artificial intelligence spending. Bills for AI have ballooned – sometimes into the billions of dollars – since OpenAI first captivated Wall Street with its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, kickstarting a rush by businesses to deploy the technology across areas like customer support, marketing and finance.
In particular, costs ramped up in the realm of AI-assisted coding, as developers pumped tokens into the creation of new tools and services that previously would have required teams of coders. That led to the era of so-called tokenmaxxing and AI leaderboards, where employers have incentivized developers to use as much AI as possible without worrying about the results.
The crackdown is underway. Uber said this month it had implemented a series of spending tiers on some AI tools, starting at a base level of $1,500 per month, though employees could request access to higher levels. In April, Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga revealed to The Information that the ride-sharing company blew through its entire annual AI budget in just four months.
watch nowVIDEO04:09Why OpenAI and Anthropic may be rushing to IPO amid fears of AI premium fadingTechCheck
OpenAI and Anthropic have been the principal beneficiaries of the spend-at-all-cost mentality, which has fueled their exponential growth rates and pushed both of the AI model leaders to valuations approaching $1 trillion.
Now, as they gear up for potentially historic IPOs — both filed confidentially in early June — the mood around AI is shifting, and business leaders like Crivello are no longer willing to throw money at Anthropic or OpenAI without a clear picture of a return on their investment.
“Current growth rates for Anthropic and OpenAI are the fastest they will ever be, which is mostly a matter of basic math,” Gil Luria, an equity analyst covering tech companies at D.A. Davidson, told CNBC. “That is a good reason to go public now, as is the concern that some of their largest enterprise customers may start limiting their out-of-control token spend.”
Anthropic last reported a $47 billion annualized run rate in May, up from the roughly $10 billion in revenue it recorded for all of last year. OpenAI’s run rate was pacing closer to $25 billion earlier this year, according to reports, up from the $13.1 billion in revenue it generated in 2025.
Listing soon, while the numbers are still dazzling, could be strategic.
“There has to be some period of time in the future where there’s some rationalizing of spend by companies, and that may be a blip ahead for Anthropic and OpenAI,” Luria said in an interview. “That creates some sense of urgency to go public before we see that.”
Anthropic declined to comment for this story. OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment.
‘Spend crunch on AI’
Crivello said he’s a big fan of Anthropic, but his company had been dealing with “unsustainable” AI costs for a long time.
Lindy was built around the idea that the cost of tokens, or the units of data that are processed and generated by AI models, would decrease dramatically over time, Crivello said. That proved true for a while, but leading model developers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have been slower to slash prices in recent months.
Crivello said he’d be open to switching Lindy back to Claude models if the prices come down.
“I hope that they cut the costs again at some point but, until then, we’ve got options,” he said.
Jeff Henry, president of consulting at Highspring, said some of his firm’s clients are pulling back until they “can really start to prove an ROI,” and others are still waiting another 12 to 18 months before making any big spending decisions.
“Everybody is experiencing the same spend crunch on AI,” he said.
However, there are still countless mid-sized companies that haven’t even started experimenting with AI yet, he said.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks on an artificial intelligence panel during Inbound 2025 Powered by HubSpot at Moscone Center on in San Francisco, Sept. 4, 2025.Chance Yeh | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
“AI is not going away,” Henry said. “There’s no way that toothpaste ever goes back in the tube.”
Darren Kimura, CEO of enterprise AI company AISquared, said one area where AI spending is “absolutely” hitting a peak is in use of state-of-the-art models, also known as frontier models, for simple tasks that can be accomplished with cheaper alternatives.
Some companies are turning to what’s called model routing, which matches the appropriate task to the appropriate model. It’s a technique so new that, according to Glean CEO Arvind Jain, roughly 95% of enterprise AI usage is still running on frontier models.
Kimura said that approach will be “untenable” for most companies in the long run.
D.A. Davidson’s Luria said pricing in the market is still at an “unsophisticated” stage, but both OpenAI and Anthropic have been trying to adjust to an increasingly budget-conscious environment.
OpenAI launched analytics and updated controls for enterprises earlier this month, allowing administrators to break down credit spend across the workplace, set usage limits and give employees visibility into their available budgets. Anthropic rolled out a series of controls in August that allow customers to provision users, view analytics and set spending limits at the organization and individual level.
Finance departments are paying close attention after getting hit with surprisingly large AI bills, said Eric Glyman, co-CEO of expense management startup Ramp.
“Most CFOs not only didn’t plan for this in their annual plans — the steep growth — but don’t have great tools to manage this,” Glyman said in an interview. “Suddenly you have this third pillar that has showed up, which is spending through tokens and intelligence. It’s not a clean area of spend.”
Emerging competition
As companies become more price sensitive to AI, OpenAI and Anthropic have to contend with deep-pocketed competitors that are aiming to develop lower-cost models.
Microsoft, which has poured more than $13 billion into OpenAI as much as $5 billion in Anthropic, unveiled a suite of new low-cost models earlier this month. The company has also emphasized that its AI coding product, GitHub Copilot, will route users to the most appropriate model for a task.
In a June essay, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry needs to avoid concentrating power in a handful of large providers.
“The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see,” Nadella wrote. “If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it.”
CEO Satya Nadella speaks during Microsoft Build 2026. Courtesy: Microsoft
Amazon and Google are also ramping up their investments in models for business users.
Peter DeSantis, Amazon’s top AI executive, told CNBC this month that he hopes the company will be able to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic’s frontier models in the “coming year.” Like Microsoft, Amazon is an investor in both of those companies.
DeSantis said in February that Amazon will rely on its in-house chips to develop models at a less expensive rate than its rivals.
“AI has a cost problem,” he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “If we ultimately want AI to transform everything, the costs have to be different.”
Google made a concerted effort to highlight affordable AI offerings at its annual developer conference last month. The company showcased Gemini 3.5 Flash, a lighter-weight addition to its model suite that’s available at half, or in some cases close to one-third, the price of comparable frontier models, according to CEO Sundar Pichai.
“Microsoft and Google have the infrastructure and capability – the entire stack – where they can come in and stiff-arm both OpenAI and Anthropic,” PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes said in an interview. “They’re probably waiting on the sidelines for them to battle it out, see where they’re not doing well.”
As for going public, neither of the big model companies have provided an exact timeframe for their prospective debuts. The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing people involved in the deliberations, that OpenAI is leaning toward holding off until next year.
Pressure to go public may revolve around the need for capital. With Anthropic and OpenAI increasingly competing against their biggest financial backers, the IPO market may be the best avenue for new money, especially as their capital needs have become too great for most venture and private equity firms.
“A lot of the traditional pockets of capital are drying up,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures. “All the institutional investors who can invest in these companies have already taken their pound of flesh.”
WATCH: Anthropic accuses Alibaba of campaign to extract AI capabilities
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