Anthropic Customers’ Bills Are 80% Higher Than They Need to Be, Glean Says

As AI search startup Glean moves into competition with rivals like Anthropic in automating white-collar tasks, its executives are zeroing in on two topics keeping corporate chief information officers awake at night: Token costs and data security.

Glean last week shared internal evaluations showing its AI assistant is much cheaper to use than Anthropic’s Claude Cowork app in performing more than 180 business tasks. Glean says that’s because its tools help customers such as Intuit, Booking.com, and Zillow to develop a so-called context layer that helps agents quickly find data they need to complete tasks, including an “enterprise graph” that helps the AI understand connections between corporate data. 

For instance, Glean’s AI assistant, powered by models such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, used 70% fewer tokens to accomplish the same tasks as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork application, which was running Claude Sonnet 5 with high reasoning, according to a Glean spokesperson. (Anthropic, on its website, says Sonnet 5’s performance is “close to that of Opus 4.8” but costs less.)

At any rate, Glean says its assistant charged customers an average of 81% less than Claude Cowork on a per-task basis, in part because the assistant also used Glean’s built-in software that routes tasks to different models, depending on the level of complexity. 

An Anthropic spokesperson didn’t have a comment.