From 24/7 Wall Street, August 4:
“Big Short” investor Steve Eisman said on his own show, Real Eisman Playbook, that “If I was the head of Anthropic or OpenAI, I’d be petrified. That spells to me price war.” The comment lands at an inconvenient moment: both labs have filed confidentially with the SEC and are aiming at public listings near $1 trillion. Eisman literally said “price war.” The valuation-collapse framing in our headline is our inference layered on that quote, since a $1 trillion IPO story assumes pricing power a price war would erode.
The Moonshot Threat: Kimi K3 and Open Weights
Eisman’s specific concern is Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, which he says charges $3 per million input tokens versus $5 for OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and $10 for Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. Pricing is only half the story. Moonshot released Kimi K3’s full model weights, so developers can run and customize it independently rather than staying locked to Moonshot’s platform. That undercuts the “stickiness” closed-model economics depend on. If an enterprise buyer can host a comparable model on its own GPUs at a fraction of frontier API pricing, the switching cost justifying premium subscription economics thins every quarter. Eisman made the argument while challenging tech bulls Dan Ives and D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria on AI moats.
The IPO StakesAnthropic filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1, 2026, with OpenAI following shortly after (reporting varies, around early June); both filings remain confidential rather than public S-1s. Anthropic is targeting an October 2026 NASDAQ listing off a $965 billion private valuation, potentially the first company to debut publicly at $1 trillion+. OpenAI has reportedly wavered toward a 2027 listing amid market volatility, with CEO Sam Altman said to have a “hard floor” of a $1 trillion listing price. As of Eisman’s July 29 broadcast, Polymarket traders priced Anthropic’s odds of going public by year-end at ~69%, versus just 19% for OpenAI. Public investors will price the moat directly, which makes Eisman’s price-war framing pointed rather than academic.
China’s Price War Is Already Underway: Baidu
On Bloomberg’s The Asia Trade on August 3, 2026, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Robert Lee argued the commoditization Eisman fears is already playing out in China. “There’s a high level of commoditization in the AI sector. The sector is overpopulated, flooded with supply. At last count there were 988 large language models officially approved by China,” Lee said. He drew a parallel to solar’s collapse: an oversupplied market where price-cutting is the only lever left. DeepSeek cut API pricing by as much as 50%, and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU | BIDU Price Prediction) cut API pricing by 99% earlier in 2026. Baidu’s own numbers show the model shift underneath the price war: AI Cloud Infra revenue rose 79% YoY while Online Marketing Services fell 22% YoY. Lee named Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), Tencent, and Huawei as the best-capitalized survivors. Alibaba backs that up with a Cloud Intelligence Group accelerating 40% externally and Qwen’s open-source family surpassing 1 billion cumulative Hugging Face downloads, per its Q4 FY26 6-K filing.
The Bull Rebuttal: Alphabet and Real Revenue...
....MUCH MORE
Related:
"Apollo's Sløk: The market faces big risks if hyperscalers' AI profits get delayed"
Here's Apollo, July 9:
A Slower AI Payoff Would Be Everyone's Problem
This point is key (bolding in original):
If Chinese models keep gaining and token prices keep falling, the hyperscaler cash flows expected may prove too optimistic.
If interested see also July 7's ""Frontiers of compute: The technologies to reduce AI inference costs"—McKinsey
The cost of inference has dropped by over 99.5% in the last three or four years while the price to the end user definitely has not fallen by that much and in fact all-in costs have actually risen. That gap is the opportunity China is focused on.
AI: "A brief history of Sam Altman’s hype" (MIT Technology Review's Hype Correction series)
"OpenAI Considers Drastic Price Cuts, Anticipating War for Users With Anthropic"
SoftBank Stock Plunges On Possible OpenAI IPO Delay (9984:Tokyo)
Not Good - "Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center"
SemiAnalysis On Moonshot AI's Kimi K3: Probably Good For Nvidia and HBM; Not So Much For Open AI