More companies are turning away from top-tier frontier models to save money, running workloads on open-weight AI models instead. The Financial Times reports that executive mentions of open models in corporate earnings and events jumped sixfold in August and September compared with the same period last year, citing AlphaSense data.

AT&T runs about 40% of its AI workloads on open models today and plans to reach 70% within a year. Open-weight models cost less to run than frontier systems, and that gap is becoming more attractive as companies work to control their AI spending.

The shift is landing right as Anthropic and OpenAI cut prices on their flagship tiers — GPT-6 Sol and Luna at roughly half the price of prior tiers, and Claude Opus 5.5 about 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5. The labs' price war and the open-model migration may be feeding each other: cheaper frontier pricing makes open weights relatively less attractive, while open-weight adoption pressures the labs to keep cutting.