Anthropic Claude subscription plan provides more value than OpenAI's, study says

The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the two leading US AI model makers, is no contest when it comes to assessing which one gives you more value for your subscription money, according to industry research firm SemiAnalysis.

Following changes to OpenAI's $200 per month subscription plan that effectively halved its value, SemiAnalysis looked at the various subscription plans offered by AI companies, because that's still the main way that individuals and small businesses buy AI services.

AI subscriptions are heavily subsidized – customers get far more tokens for their money than they would paying metered API rates. And SemiAnalysis argues that it's necessary to delve into subscription pricing to evaluate AI shops financially because subscription usage consumes a disproportionate amount of company compute resources. 

Claude subscriptions, the biz claims, take up about 42 percent of Anthropic's inference compute while generating just 10 percent of its revenue. And those subscriptions provide considerable value.

"Anthropic is an overwhelmingly better deal, offering ~5x the API-equivalent value across the board," SemiAnalysis claims in reference to mid-tier models GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5. "You could argue that this is unfair for [OpenAI] because 6.1 Sol is much cheaper per token than Opus 5.5, but the gap is still massive even if you switch to comparing the number of tokens."