AI Token Prices Hit All-Time Lows, Down 50% From May Peak

TechFlow reported on September 2 that, according to Yonhap News Agency, the LLM Token Expenditure Index published by U.S. market intelligence firm Silicon Data fell to 97 cents per million tokens on August 31, marking a historical low since its launch at the end of last year, down more than 50% from its peak of $2.05 in May.

Analysts indicate that the open-source model "Kimi K3" released by Chinese AI company Moonshot AI, OpenAI's July price reduction for the ChatGPT-5.6 series, and dynamic pricing mechanisms adopted by industry leaders have collectively driven this recent price decline. While dropping token prices help reduce user costs, they exert revenue pressure on model developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. An investment lead at venture capital firm Seez Group noted that foundational model providers are facing the most direct impact, recommending a strategic pivot to strengthen distribution channels, memory, and context capabilities to increase user migration costs and counter competitive erosion from open-source models.