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

According to Yonhap News Agency, the LLM Token Expenditure Index released by US market information agency Silicon Data fell to 97 cents per million tokens on August 31, marking a historic low since its establishment at the end of last year, down over 50% from the May high of $2.05. Analysts attribute this downward price trend to several key drivers: the launch of the open-source model "Kimi K3" by Chinese AI firm Moonshot AI, OpenAI's price cut for the ChatGPT-5.6 series in July, and the implementation of dynamic pricing mechanisms by leading vendors. While the decline in token prices helps reduce user costs, it will create revenue pressure for model developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The investment head at Seez Group pointed out that foundational model companies are most directly impacted, recommending a strategic shift toward strengthening distribution channels, memory, and context capabilities to raise user switching costs and defend against competitive erosion from open-source models.