OpenAI Fights Back in AI Competition as Revenue Hits $40B, Anthropic Maintains Lead at $47B

OpenAI is gaining on Anthropic with business users, new data indicates

Until both OpenAI and Anthropic get close enough to their planned IPOs to release their financials, we have to look to other sources for signs of how well their businesses are doing. One of those sources, Ramp, the corporate credit card and expense management company, has just released some surprising new data: OpenAI has started gaining on Anthropic with US businesses. OpenAI, which was once the runaway leader with both businesses and consumers, lost the lead among Ramp's paying business users back in May. That's when Anthropic hit 41% market share to OpenAI's 39%. The ChatGPT maker has never regained that lead. As of July, Anthropic has nearly 44% to OpenAI's nearly 40%. The data covers more than 70,000 American businesses that spend billions via Ramp's bill pay and corporate card products. Ramp's customers are spread across industries but, as a popular Silicon Valley corporate credit card, they do skew toward the tech industry. A closer look at the most recent data, according to Ramp economist Ara Kharazian, shows that OpenAI is currently growing faster among this segment in Q3 to date than Anthropic. Mind you, there's still a month left in the quarter and that's like 30 AI years, so the trend could easily shift again before it's over. Ramp also declined to provide actual dollars spent, sharing only percentages. To borrow ChatGPT's own hedging style for a moment: this isn't a measure of the the total market. It excludes large enterprises that use spend-management tools from providers like American Express, rather than Ramp. But it's enough data to show market indications. And what it shows is that Anthropic hasn't won permanently. Businesses are willing to flop back and forth as each lab releases new models, volatility that should give both companies' investors pause about how "sticky" enterprise AI spending really is. "GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers," Kharazian posted on X about OpenAI's new growth. "Fable 5, meanwhile, disappointed both in adoption and real-world application given price + data retention requirements imposed by regulators," he continued. That may be an over simplification. Fable -- Anthropic's higher-end model tier -- is expensive but it's also built for a more targeted set of use cases than a general chatbot. Still, Anthropic did cause some outrage when it warned Fable users that it must retain their data for 30 days. Ramp's data also suggests that both companies should be growing business revenue, even as they duke it out for market share, because the market overall is expanding. The percentage of companies that pay for AI among these Ramp customers has been steadily climbing. It topped 50% in March. It reached nearly 56% by July.

OpenAI seeks to one-up Anthropic with new customer privacy protections

As AI models have become more powerful, the potential for those models to be misused has grown -- as has a clamor for safety guardrails that can stop such abuse from happening. AI companies must now walk a delicate tight rope between respecting their enterprise customers' privacy while also watching usage for possible issues. Sensing an opportunity to one-up its rival Anthropic, OpenAI just announced a privacy-centric safety approach to monitoring for misuse. The company is previewing a new service to select customers that it calls Private Safety Processing. This is an automated system that watches for potential abuse while simultaneously retaining none of the customer's data. This system clearly runs counter to Anthropic's recently announced data retention policy. The policy, which has aggravated some customers, enables the AI lab to keep user data (all of their sessions -- and the conversations therein) for a period of 30 days, when it comes to "covered models." Those models include all Mythos-class models and "future models with similar capabilities," the company says. This policy, which was announced in July, was designed for the purposes of safety allowing the lab to sift and analyze potential impropriety. However, it has deeply concerned some enterprises that handle large amounts of sensitive data and don't want it harbored (or inspected) by the AI lab. OpenAI -- like most other AI companies -- already afford customers a relative level of privacy by adhering to a policy known as Zero Data Retention. ZDR uses agents within the OpenAI API to monitor for abuse on a per session basis. In this way, customer data isn't retained by the company but companies are still able to scan for bad activity without the need for human intervention. It's worth noting that Anthropic also largely abides by ZDR -- except when it comes to "covered models," like Fable. OpenAI says that Private Safety Processing is a new technology that widens ZDR's scope. It describes it as a form of long-horizon safety monitoring that assesses the inputs and outputs of multiple conversations -- not just one. Again, the monitoring is conducted by an agent, which, if triggered, catches interactions and analyzes them across sessions for signs of potential misuse. The new tech helps OpenAI detect malicious use of AI that takes place over multiple sessions, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. A bad actor -- hypothetically someone trying to engineer malware for a cyberattack -- may spread out their requests to avoid detection. Private Safety Processing can analyze those multiple conversations for signs of abuse without human review of a user's conversations. In the case where the system is triggered, it may send a "narrowly defined signal" to OpenAI that warns of a specific type of activity, the company says. Based on that signal, OpenAI can then decide whether "enforcement is necessary," it says. If so, OpenAI will reach out to the customer for more context or to work with them on the issue and a customer may choose to share data with OpenAI at their discretion, the spokesperson said. By contrast, Anthropic notes that human review of customer data can occur, but only "through a controlled access path" that involves "a small set of approved reviewers." Every one of those review sessions is "recorded in a tamper-proof log that reviewers cannot suppress or modify," the company says. The corporate competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is tense at the moment, with both companies looking for any opportunity to gain an advantage on the other. A recent report showed that OpenAI's Q2 grew more slowly than Anthropic. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate is now reportedly $65 billion. Anthropic investors have said it could IPO at $2 trillion, while OpenAI is also working on its IPO.

Stock winners and losers as Anthropic passes OpenAI as hottest AI upstart

Anthropic is pulling ahead of OpenAI in the frontier model race, laying the foundations for a new hierarchy of dominance within the rapidly developing artificial intelligence sector. From the first to the second quarter, Anthropic more than doubled its revenue while OpenAI's increased by just 18%, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. OpenAI's operating margins, which were already in the red, also sank lower - a bad sign ahead of a hotly anticipated initial public offering. Meanwhile, Anthropic is projecting as much as $200 billion in 2028 revenue, far exceeding the $47 billion revenue run rate that the company publicized in May, Reuters reported last week. Investors say it's much too early to demote OpenAI, but they have been expecting stratification and consolidation at the frontier level for some time, which will have consequences for frontier models' partner companies, customers and suppliers. "Anthropic's partners, like HUT that I initiated coverage on yesterday, potentially win. OpenAI's potentially lose," Paul Meeks, head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets, told CNBC Wednesday. " ORCL is probably the most threatened here because its [remaining performance obligations are] dominated by OpenAI." "That being said," Meeks cautioned, "I don't think we should throw in the towel yet on Team OpenAI. It's way too early for that." Back at the end of April, investment bank Jefferies put out a basket of names levered to OpenAI, including Oracle, CoreWeave , SoftBank and Broadcom , among others. Since the last trading day in April, Oracle stock is down about 12%; CoreWeave is down about 17%; and Broadcom is down about 13%. Nvidia is up about 10% and Microsoft is up about 18% over the same period. While webs of interconnected, circular investments across computing supply chains make it unlikely that OpenAI and its suppliers will be cleaved away from other segments of the industry, analysts do see some partitioning within these webs. Google parent Alphabet and Amazon stand to benefit from Anthropic's ascendence both at the level of cloud computing and semiconductors. "Since Anthropic gets most of its compute from Google and Amazon, it gets most of its compute on Trainium chips and TPUs, not Nvidia chips," Gil Luria, head of technology research at DA Davidson, said. "And that feeds into a whole ecosystem, including Broadcom." While Anthropic looks to be overtaking OpenAI at the moment, OpenAI is still solidly stitched into the fabric of the AI buildout, and analysts don't think the company is going anywhere. "It's Coke and Pepsi," Yi Fu Lee, managing director at Benchmark, said. "At the end of the day, the models are interchangeable." This interoperability is getting an additional boost from open-weight models - both from American and Chinese companies, such as Moonshot AI and DeepSeek. These algorithms are cheaper than their strictly proprietary rivals and often do just as good a job. Plus, multiple models can be coordinated to work together. Most on Wall Street believe that AI is on a long march toward becoming a general-purpose commodity, which means that it will get cheaper as it becomes more established and more widely adopted. In the short term, however, it could be a bumpy ride for companies that fall behind. Dan Nathan, principal of RiskReversal Advisors, said Wednesday that he's worried about Oracle, which signed a $300 billion cloud computing deal with OpenAI. "Oracle is one of those [companies] where you'd say, yes - this is an OpenAI situation," he said. "They gave them a $300 billion contract to build out compute, but if they can't do that, which they might not be able to, to the speed that OpenAI wants it and needs it, then you're going to see Oracle just absolutely collapse."

Anthropic's revenue passed OpenAI's last quarter

OpenAI told investors its revenue grew 18% to $6.7bn last quarter while its operating loss widened to $12.3bn, according to The Wall Street Journal, disappointing shareholders. Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6bn over the same period, passing OpenAI for the first time, and turned a small profit. Both are heading for IPOs. OpenAI grew more slowly than Anthropic last quarter, and for the first time its rival's sales came in higher. OpenAI told investors its revenue rose 18 percent from the first quarter to the second, to $6.7bn, The Wall Street Journal reported. Its losses deepened over the same stretch. Berber Jin and Corrie Driebusch wrote that the numbers disappointed some shareholders. The gap with Anthropic is the story. Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6bn in the same period, the Journal reported. It was the first time its sales have passed OpenAI's. Anthropic also swung to a small operating profit. OpenAI moved the other way. OpenAI's revenue rose to $6.7bn from $5.7bn in the first quarter, the Journal said. Its operating loss, which includes stock-based compensation, widened from $9.3bn to $12.3bn. That means the loss grew by $3bn while revenue added only $1bn, Jin noted in a post on X. The margin sank further into the red just as the company prepares to go public. Why a $7bn quarter still disappoints For most startups, nearly $7bn in quarterly revenue would be remarkable. The bar for OpenAI is different. The company has sold investors on a stratospheric pace of growth, the Journal reported. It has signed large computing deals premised on generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The performance of Nvidia, Oracle and other tech giants hinges on OpenAI meeting those commitments. By that yardstick, the quarter fell short. OpenAI's sequential growth trailed Palantir over the same period, the Journal said. It also lagged other AI highfliers such as CoreWeave and Micron. Anthropic, by contrast, told investors it had made progress in how efficiently it uses computing resources. Jin framed the exclusive bluntly. "OpenAI has been tossing out a lot of vague ARR numbers, so we decided to take a deeper look," he wrote on X. The company, he added, "grew revenue by just 18 percent... while its losses sank further into the red." OpenAI says the growth is turning OpenAI pushed a more upbeat account to investors. Its growth rate has picked up since it launched a set of new models in July, the people told the Journal. Revenue from business customers grew 32 percent in July from the month before, the New York Times reported. That outpaced its overall run rate. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar told investors most of the company's revenue now comes from business customers. The company is also reshaping its product. It recently released a "super app" that folds its Codex coding tool, ChatGPT and a web browser together. The company says the product is drawing users fast. Co-founder and president Greg Brockman has taken a more active role over the product and business teams, the Journal reported, in a push to reaccelerate growth. The push follows a bruising stretch for its leadership. OpenAI last week replaced its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after less than a year, the Journal said. Her exit followed that of former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap. It also followed the departure of Fidji Simo, once seen as a possible successor to chief executive Sam Altman. Two IPOs, two very different pitches The results land as both labs prepare to list. Anthropic could go public as soon as this autumn, according to the Financial Times, cited by the Times. Investors are targeting a $2tn valuation. OpenAI is likely to follow next year. Both need to show strong growth to investors as their costs are set to climb for years. Anthropic is already lining up the machinery. It is setting up a multi-class share structure that hands its founders outsized control, according to The Information, and expanding its credit line, according to Bloomberg. Its reported revenue carries a caveat, though. The Journal said it is unclear how Anthropic calculated its adjusted profit, and noted the company has previously excluded stock-based compensation from that figure. Its preliminary revenue has also been reported at $11.5bn by Bloomberg, a shade below the Journal's $11.6bn. A pause, and a skeptical crowd The financials arrived days after OpenAI said it was slowing down. Altman wrote on X that the company had "paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us." He said model progress was "extremely rapid." The desk has covered that pause, which followed a test in which OpenAI's agents hacked other companies. Not everyone took the stated reason at face value. "There's no way this is the real reason right," one user replied. Another, Ross Hendricks, offered his own reading: "we need to immediately stop torching cash to provide some semblance of a sustainable business model so we can rush this IPO out the door." OpenAI has given a safety rationale for the pause. The timing, next to the widening losses, is what the skeptics seized on. The desk takes no view on which reading is right. The pressure underneath Part of the squeeze is competitive. OpenAI subsidises hundreds of millions of users who do not pay for ChatGPT, the Journal reported, and it cut prices on two of its latest models after corporate customers grew cautious and shifted tasks to cheaper Chinese models. Anthropic has had to calm the same investor nerves about those models. For now, the two companies are telling opposite stories into the same IPO window. Anthropic points to a doubling of revenue and a first profit. OpenAI points to July's reacceleration and a growing base of business customers. The quarter itself, though, put Anthropic's sales ahead of OpenAI's for the first time, and left OpenAI explaining a loss that grew faster than its revenue.

OpenAI annualized revenue tops $40 billion ahead of IPO

OpenAI is headed toward annualized revenue exceeding $40 billion, a figure that would represent roughly twice the run rate it recorded at the close of 2025, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity. The acceleration comes as the company prepares for a public market debut and is locked in a competition with rival Anthropic PBC for business customers. OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman said in an internal announcement Thursday that the company's annual revenue run rate grew more than 20% month-over-month in July. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar had previously said the company ended 2025 with more than $20 billion in annualized revenue. Bloomberg attributed the revenue surge to several factors, including rising demand for the company's AI coding products, growth in its subscription base, and the early development of an advertising revenue stream. Demand has also climbed for OpenAI's AI agents -- among them Codex, which handles coding tasks, and ChatGPT Work, which addresses a wider range of workplace needs. OpenAI has also lowered pricing on select models as it fights for budget-sensitive customers in a crowded field that includes Anthropic and numerous Chinese competitors. Anthropic disclosed in May that its run-rate revenue had surpassed $47 billion, though Bloomberg cautioned that the two companies could be using different methodologies to calculate that figure. As Friar told employees in late July, OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue for that month had already surpassed the company's total for the second quarter. She and board chair Bret Taylor attributed that momentum to three products: the GPT-5.6 model series, ChatGPT Work, and Codex. Taylor acknowledged at the same meeting that OpenAI had been playing catch-up in the coding market. OpenAI's revenue gains come against a backdrop of significant losses. The company posted a net loss of $38.5 billion in 2025 on $13.07 billion in revenue, according to audited financial documents. On Thursday, OpenAI named Dali Rajic as its new chief revenue officer, replacing Denise Dresser, who is leaving the company. Rajic most recently served as president and chief operating officer of cybersecurity firm Wiz. The leadership change is one of several senior departures at OpenAI in recent months as the company works to build out its enterprise business ahead of going public. OpenAI submitted a confidential IPO prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June.

OpenAI falls further behind Anthropic, with disappointing revenue growth and mounting losses

OpenAI falls further behind Anthropic, with disappointing revenue growth and mounting losses OpenAI Group PBC is falling further behind its rival Anthropic PBC, if its latest financials are any indication. The artificial intelligence model maker told investors that its revenue rose 18% on a sequential basis, from the first to the second quarter, but it also grew its net losses. The numbers are likely to be hugely disappointing for investors in the company, who have been hoping it would be able to show it's catching up with Anthropic. OpenAI said it generated $6.7 billion in sales in the three month period ending in June, up from $5.7 billion in the first quarter, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. However, its operating margin dropped further into the red, which will likely deepen concerns that many have about the company's ability to ever generate a profit. The numbers, which come from undisclosed sources who are familiar with the company's finances, are a big deal because they come ahead of a hotly-anticipated initial public offering, which many believe could take place later this year, the Journal reported. The report came just one day after Anthropic revealed that its revenue had jumped by more than 50% on a sequential basis to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. It also recorded a small operating profit for the first time. While OpenAI and Anthropic are widely perceived to be the AI industry's market leaders, the way their fortunes have diverged is quite astonishing. Last year, many considered OpenAI to be ahead of its rival due to its first-mover advantage and the stellar growth and brand recognition of ChatGPT, but this year the picture has changed dramatically. ChatGPT's growth has stalled, while Anthropic has enjoyed huge success with its hit coding tool Claude Code, especially with enterprise customers. OpenAI has suddenly found itself on the back foot, and it has responded by letting go of a number of senior executives amid a pivot to AI agents that can automate business work. In the latest high-profile departure, OpenAI got rid of its Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who had been with the company for less than a year. She was just the latest in a string of names to leave the company, following former Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, who was previously seen as a potential heir to Chief Executive Sam Altman. Normally, if a startup was able to generate more than $6 billion in quarterly revenue, it would be viewed as an incredible feat, but OpenAI is not any normal startup. The company has raked in around $180 billion in funding to fuel the AI boom, and that money has been spent lavishly on building AI data centers and massive contracts with cloud computing providers. However, those deals, which have helped to drive surging stock prices across the technology industry, are premised on OpenAI's ability to pay its bills, but to do that it needs to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue. If OpenAI fails to meet these growth targets and can't meet its contractual obligations, the share prices of companies like Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp. and other tech giants could nosedive. Today's report doesn't look good. OpenAI's sequential growth rate was slower than that of other companies riding the wave of the AI boom, such as CoreWeave Inc., Micron Technology Inc. and also the software firm Palantir Technologies Inc. According to the Journal, OpenAI told investors privately that its growth rate has accelerated since the launch of a new generation of models in July, but it did not provide any numbers to back up that claim. The company has also recently released a new "super app" that integrates ChatGPT with its coding tool Codex and an AI-native web browser, and it says the product is growing fast, attracting many new users. Meanwhile, President Greg Brockman, who is one of just three of its original co-founders still involved with the company, has become more involved with product and business development in an attempt to ignite new growth. But Brockman and Altman have a lot of work to do, for the company's operating loss climbed to $12.3 billion in the second quarter, up from $9.3 billion in the first. That means its losses are expanding faster than its revenue is. To make matters worse, Anthropic reportedly managed to deliver an operating profit of $559 million over the same period. The company said it has managed to do this by making more efficient use of its computing resources. However, it's important to note that Anthropic is a private company and isn't forced to disclose its financial figures. As such, it did not reveal what methods were used to calculate its operating profit. One of the reasons why OpenAI is so unprofitable is that it subsidizes hundreds of millions of users globally who don't pay a subscription to use ChatGPT. It was also compelled to lower the prices of two of its newest models to make them more enticing for corporate customers who have grown more cautious about their AI spending. Many organizations have chosen to use more affordable open-source models, including Chinese systems, to save money on the cost of AI, posing yet another threat to OpenAI.

Anthropic's Revenue Has Soared. Is It Enough for Investors?

Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. Anthropic's sales have been on a tear. The AI startup's annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, Bloomberg reported yesterday, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That's big growth, though it's uncertain what it could mean for the company's coming IPO, since the Financial Times recently reported that some investors expect that number to reach $100 billion this year. Whether that kind of growth suggests a healthy AI trade and supports the kind of valuations Anthropic and rival OpenAI -- the world's two most valuable private startups -- hope to justify, remains to be seen. Anthropic is expected to go public as soon as next month, potentially at a valuation even higher than what Elon Musk managed for SpaceX (SPCX) in June. OpenAI has pushed its initial public offering off to next year as SpaceX shares have fallen below their open price since their mid-June debut. A string of high-profile departures at OpenAI lately has also added to concerns. Last week, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI's annualized revenue run crossed $40 billion, roughly doubling from the end of 2025. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to Investopedia's requests for comment in time for publication.

OpenAI's annualised revenue tops $40 billion ahead of IPO

OpenAI is poised to surpass $40 billion in annual revenue, propelling its ambitions for a public offering in the near future, accroding to a report by Bloomberg. The ChatGPT maker's revenue has accelerated in recent months, driven in part by the growth of its AI coding software, said the report. OpenAI is on track to generate annualised revenue of more than $40 billion based on its current performance, according to people familiar with the matter, roughly doubling its run rate from the end of 2025 and bolstering the company's plans for a Wall Street debut. The ChatGPT maker's revenue has accelerated in recent months, driven in part by the growth of its AI coding software, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. The gains also reflect momentum from subscription sales and its nascent advertising business. Its core consumer business continues to grow, too. OpenAI declined to comment. OpenAI is locked in a fierce battle with longtime rival Anthropic PBC to sign up more business customers. Both firms have filed confidential paperwork to go public, with Anthropic expected to IPO as soon as this fall, ahead of OpenAI. Once viewed as the underdog, Anthropic has gained traction with AI tools that streamline complex tasks, including coding. Anthropic said in May that its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion, though the two firms may not measure it the same way. A company's run rate projects full-year revenue from a shorter period. On Thursday, OpenAI named its second new chief revenue officer in less than a year, tapping a cybersecurity executive to help drive sales growth. As part of an internal announcement for the hire, OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman said the company's annual revenue run rate increased more than 20% month-over-month in July. Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, previously said the company had ended last year with more than $20 billion in annualized revenue. OpenAI has seen a sharp uptick in demand for its AI agents in recent weeks, including Codex for coding and ChatGPT Work for a wider mix of tasks. The company has also cut prices on certain models to better compete for cost-conscious customers against Anthropic and a long list of Chinese rivals.

OpenAI Revenue Run Rate Tops $40 Billion Ahead Of IPO - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

OpenAI's annualized revenue has topped $40 billion, roughly double its level at the end of 2025, with President Greg Brockman saying the run rate jumped more than 20% in July alone. The surge comes just as the price of AI is falling. Prices for leading U.S. models have dropped by almost a quarter since mid-July, according to Silicon Data's token price index, amid intensifying competition from cheaper Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek and Moonshot, the Financial Times reported. That sets up the central test of OpenAI's reported push toward a $1 trillion initial public offering: whether explosive growth in usage can outrun falling prices and heavy compute costs. OpenAI Revenue Accelerates From $24 Billion to $40 Billion OpenAI said in March it was generating $2 billion per month, or roughly $24 billion annualized, with more than 900 million weekly ChatGPT users and over 50 million paying subscribers. Enterprise customers accounted for more than 40% of revenue. The new figure implies the run rate has grown at least 67% since late March. Bloomberg said the acceleration has been driven partly by OpenAI's coding software, subscription sales and emerging advertising business, while demand for agents including Codex and ChatGPT Work has also jumped. Chinese Rivals Turn Up the Pressure OpenAI has cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and Terra by 20%, while leaving its flagship Sol unchanged. Anthropic scrapped a planned September price increase for Sonnet 5 and launched Opus 5 at half the price of its top model, Fable 5. Falling Prices May Be a Feature, Not a Bug OpenAI says improvements to its inference systems have reduced the end-to-end cost of serving GPT-5.6 by 20% and lifted token-generation efficiency by more than 15%. Early OpenRouter data suggests the price cuts may already be stimulating enough additional usage to offset lower prices. TD Cowen, analyzing OpenRouter data after the July 30 cuts, found Luna consumption jumped roughly 14-fold while Terra usage rose about fivefold, per Business Insider. The analysts estimated OpenRouter revenue climbed 34% for Luna and 45% for Terra versus the preceding seven days. Can OpenAI Grow Into $1 Trillion? The Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)-backed startup reportedly reached an $852 billion valuation in March. A $1 trillion listing would value the company at roughly 25 times its current annualized revenue run rate. The stakes are heightened by OpenAI's enormous infrastructure bill: the company is targeting roughly $600 billion in compute spending through 2030, according to Reuters. Traders on Polymarket currently see a 17% chance that OpenAI completes an IPO this year, with $2.7 million in volume traded. A separate market puts the chance that OpenAI's valuation reaches $1 trillion by year-end at 65%, while traders see roughly a 30% chance of $1.5 trillion. OpenAI has shown it can grow at extraordinary speed. Its trillion-dollar IPO push will test whether surging AI usage can continue to outrun falling prices and enormous infrastructure costs. Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Anthropic Beats OpenAI in Revenue for First Time | PYMNTS.com

OpenAI told investors that its revenue grew by 18% in the second quarter, compared to the first, while its losses deepened. The company's second quarter revenue reached $6.7 billion, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. OpenAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. According to the WSJ report, Anthropic more than doubled its revenue over the same period and made a small operating profit. The company's second quarter revenue reached $11.6 billion. The report attributed the second quarter results to OpenAI's ChatGPT seeing a slowdown in growth, while Anthropic's Claude Code coding tool saw continued success. OpenAI told investors that its growth rate has accelerated during the current quarter, following the launch of new AI models in July, according to the report. Bloomberg reported Friday (Aug. 14) that Anthropic shared with would-be investors that its preliminary revenue figure for the second quarter was more than $11.5 billion and that it earned positive adjusted operating income. Anthropic's second quarter revenue marked a greater than 14-fold increase compared to the $787 million it earned during the same quarter in 2025. Bloomberg noted that Anthropic's growth is happening as the company is competing with OpenAI for enterprise customers. Anthropic had been an underdog in the race between the two companies, but has since enjoyed a wave of corporate adoption of its products for uses like coding. PYMNTS reported in June 2025 that AI coding assistants enable smaller teams to do tasks that would cost a lot more and require additional engineers, and they cut development time for businesses to bring products to market faster. On Aug. 5, PYMNTS reported that several companies, including OpenAI, Meta and Google, have been working to expand and enhance their offerings in AI coding. On Wednesday (Aug. 12), it was reported that DeepSeek is also targeting the agentic coding market. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidential paperwork to go public, and Anthropic is expected to reach the market as soon as this fall, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Aug. 13). For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

OpenAI's New Customer Privacy Protection Gives It a Leg-up Over Anthropic

The ChatGPT-maker has launched a new service that helps OpenAI detect malicious use of AI over multiple sessions such as a cyberattack incident At a time when OpenAI appears to be losing the revenue battle against arch rival Anthropic, Sam Altman has evolved a new strategy of taking the moral high ground, something his bête noire Dario Amodei has used in the past. The ChatGPT-maker announced a slew of privacy-centric safety regulations to monitor misuse of the company's most powerful AI models. Once again though, the new service, christened Private Safety Processing, is only available on preview mode to select customers. OpenAI says it is an automated system that oversees all activity and flags off those that could potentially abuse customer privacy norms. It also ensures that the model does not retain the customer's data. And yet, it appears to be stealing a march over Anthropic, which had recently released its own data-retention policy. OpenAI's pronouncements are running counter to Anthropic's However, we believe OpenAI and Altman could also be responding to concerns over closed LLM-makers from the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who told enterprise customers that they pay twice for using such services - one in cash or tokens and the other by opening up their enterprise data. Anthropic had come out with its data-retention policies in a blog post published on July 10. It had said that the company required "limited data retention and review as part of our safety work. Prompts submitted to, and outputs generated by, covered models are retained for 30 days to support our safety work, on every platform where these models are offered." Now OpenAI says that it is offering zero data retention for frontier models. In its blog post, the company says "Zero Data Retention gives eligible API customers a clear promise: OpenAI does not retain their prompts or model responses after a request is processed. Customer content is not available to OpenAI personnel for review, and enterprise customer data is not used to train our models unless customers explicitly opt-in." By the looks of things, Sam Altman has indeed scored a point against his arch rival, whose AI company is in the midst of preparing for its public offering that analysts believe could fetch as high or a higher valuation than the largest-to-date IPO from Elon Musk's SpaceX that raised around $75 billion from the markets at a jaw-dropping valuation of around $1.77 trillion. However, Anthropic's revelations that were designed to convince customers over their data safety and privacy issues, ended up causing considerable consternation among companies that handle massive amounts of sensitive data and do not want it stored or inspected by an AI Lab. This report published by The WSJ had highlighted the growing distrust faced by Anthropic "from startup founders and researchers over competitive tactics, guardrails and lack of support for open-weight models." OpenAI already has its Zero Data Retention or ZDR policy in place where agents within the OpenAI API monitors for abuse on a per session basis. So, customer data is not retained by the company but bad activity could still be scanned continuously without human oversight. Even Anthropic adheres to this concept barring cases where Fable 5 is involved. Now, Team Altman is saying that its Privacy Safety Processing adds to ZDR's scope by delivering a long-horizon safety monitory option that assesses both inputs and outputs of multiple chats. Once again, it is an AI agent that monitors and when triggered seeks to capture interactions, analyse them across sessions for any potential signs of misuse. The company says it helps OpenAI detect malicious use of AI over multiple sessions where PSP can analyse multiple conversations from a bad actor attempting to engineer a cyberattack. Once the system is triggered, it may send a "narrowly defined signal" to OpenAI of such activity and based on this the chatbot can decide the response - enforcement or stricter monitoring. Given the sluggish revenue growth experienced by OpenAI in the second quarter (per reports in The WSJ) and the robust revenue run rate of around $65 billion achieved by Anthropic, investors are already backing the latter to achieve a $2 trillion IPO and do so sooner than OpenAI's own planned public offer. In such a scenario, even small wins around data privacy and security could matter a lot in the ultimate analysis of how safe AI is with enterprise data.

OpenAI's Revenue Run Rate Tops $40 Billion as IPO Nears | PYMNTS.com

The OpenAI $40 billion revenue run-rate figure comes from a Bloomberg report published Aug. 13, which cited people familiar with the company's performance who spoke on condition of anonymity. According to Bloomberg, the acceleration was driven in part by growth in OpenAI's AI coding software, along with gains from subscription sales and a new advertising business. The company's core consumer business is still growing too. OpenAI declined to comment to Bloomberg. As part of an internal announcement about a new hire, OpenAI cofounder and President Greg Brockman shared how fast that growth is running. Bloomberg reported that "the company's annual revenue run rate increased more than 20% month-over-month in July." The report also placed OpenAI in its ongoing contest with rival Anthropic. Both firms have filed confidential paperwork to go public, and Anthropic is expected to reach the market as soon as this fall, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic said in May that its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion, though Bloomberg noted the two companies may not measure the figure the same way. On Thursday, OpenAI named its second chief revenue officer in under a year, tapping a cybersecurity executive to help push sales. The company has also seen a sharp rise in demand for its AI agents, including Codex for coding and ChatGPT Work, and it has cut prices on some models to compete for cost-conscious customers against Anthropic and a growing list of Chinese rivals. PYMNTS has tracked OpenAI's revenue climb through the year. In May, PYMNTS reported that the company generated close to $6 billion in first-quarter revenue, with Codex, business sales and ChatGPT advertising tests driving the gains. In June, PYMNTS covered OpenAI's plan to rebuild ChatGPT into a super app ahead of its IPO, with enterprise sales already making up more than 40% of revenue. PYMNTS also reported on OpenAI's planned purchase of Ona to expand Codex for enterprise workflows.

Anthropic's earnings overtake OpenAI's for the first time: 'revenue engine'

Anthropic has reportedly overtaken OpenAI in quarterly sales for the first time -- a stunning reversal for the ChatGPT maker in its bitter rivalry with the startup founded by a group of its former employees. Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion during its second quarter and reported a small adjusted profit, according to the Wall Street Journal. That was well above OpenAI's second-quarter revenue of $6.7 billion -- an 18% increase from the previous quarter's $5.7 billion, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. OpenAI said in March that it closed a financing deal with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation. Anthropic followed in May with a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation -- putting the breakaway rival's latest announced private valuation above OpenAI's. Now, Anthropic's second-quarter figures show it pulling ahead on reported revenue, too. OpenAI's operating loss, including stock-based compensation, widened to $12.3 billion during the quarter from $9.3 billion in the first quarter, according to the Journal. Anthropic, meanwhile, reported an adjusted profit and told investors it had made progress using computing resources more efficiently, though the Journal said the company's methodology for calculating the profit was not disclosed. "Hundreds of millions of free chatbot users represent OpenAI's head start, but they don't generate revenue. They only generate cost," Rob Collie, a former Microsoft executive and founding engineer on Power BI who now runs consulting firm P3 Adaptive, told The Post. "A paying business customer with AI wired into their workflow is a revenue engine," he said. "Same core AI technology, two very different businesses - and this quarter, we found out which one is a better business." Ravi Sawhney, founder and CEO of product design firm RKS Design, said OpenAI's early dominance was no guarantee it would remain on top. "OpenAI created the category, but creating a category doesn't guarantee you own it forever," Sawhney told The Post. "The question eventually shifts from 'Who has the technology?' to 'Who has built the product, service or brand that people actually want to use?'" Sawhney credited Anthropic with recognizing that shift earlier, pointing specifically to its Claude Code product. "They didn't simply build another powerful model; they focused on a very specific problem where AI could create immediate, measurable value," he said. The results mark a dramatic shift in a corporate war that has been brewing since late 2020, when Anthropic boss Dario Amodei -- then OpenAI's vice president of research -- and several colleagues left the company amid disagreements over its direction, governance and approach to AI safety. Anthropic launched the following year, with Amodei as CEO and his sister Daniela Amodei as president. They promised to put safety at the center of the company's approach as it emerged as a rival to the company led by Sam Altman. The two firms have since become fierce competitors for AI talent, corporate customers and investor dollars -- while the relationship between Altman and Amodei has grown increasingly contentious. Sawhney said OpenAI may have lost focus as the AI market matured and corporate customers began looking beyond technological prowess. "Where I think OpenAI got distracted was trying to be too many things to too many people while the market was beginning to mature," Sawhney said. "Being the most recognizable AI company is enormously valuable, but recognition isn't the same as preference or trust." The rivalry reached a remarkable turning point during OpenAI's chaotic boardroom crisis in November 2023, when directors ousted Altman and subsequently approached Amodei about replacing him as CEO, according to Reuters. The board also discussed a possible merger between OpenAI and Anthropic, but Amodei rejected both overtures, Reuters reported. Altman was reinstated days later. Earlier this year, Anthropic used Super Bowl ads to mock the prospect of advertising inside AI assistants while promising to keep Claude ad-free. Altman fired back that the campaign's portrayal of OpenAI was "clearly dishonest" and accused Anthropic of "doublespeak." The Post has sought comment from OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI's Q2 revenue growth lagged Anthropic as losses deepened, WSJ reports By Investing.com

Investing.com -- OpenAI's revenue grew 18% in the second quarter, but losses widened further as the ChatGPT maker struggled to match the pace of rival Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the company's results. OpenAI told investors that revenue reached $6.7 billion in the three months ended June, up from $5.7 billion in the first quarter. The 18% quarter-on-quarter increase disappointed some investors who had expected the company to show faster progress against Anthropic. Anthropic, by comparison, more than doubled revenue to $11.6 billion over the same period, surpassing OpenAI for the first time, while also generating a small operating profit, according to the WSJ report. The divergence highlights a shift in the AI race. OpenAI has faced slower ChatGPT growth at the same time that Anthropic's Claude Code product has gained traction with developers. The WSJ said that combination has increased pressure on OpenAI to adjust its strategy and accelerate growth. OpenAI's operating loss, including stock-based compensation, widened to $12.3 billion in the second quarter from $9.3 billion in the first. The loss grew faster than revenue, pushing the company further from profitability ahead of a potential initial public offering, the report said. Anthropic's profitability marks another point of contrast. The company told investors it had made progress in using computing resources more efficiently and reported an adjusted profit. However, the WSJ noted that Anthropic is private and the methodology behind that adjusted figure is not clear; in previous investor communications, it has excluded stock-based compensation. The pressure comes as OpenAI's investors expect extraordinary growth. The company has committed to large computing contracts based on its ability to eventually generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue, making its growth trajectory important not only to investors but also to major technology suppliers such as Nvidia and Oracle, the WSJ said. OpenAI's second-quarter sequential growth also trailed other high-growth technology companies, including Palantir, CoreWeave and Micron, according to the report. Still, OpenAI told investors that growth accelerated in the third quarter following the launch of new models in July, according to the WSJ's sources. OpenAI also faces pressure on pricing and monetization. The company subsidizes hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users who do not pay for the service and has reduced prices for two recent models after corporate customers became more cautious about AI spending and shifted some workloads to cheaper Chinese AI systems. At the same time, OpenAI has paused development of some new models and expanded monitoring of its systems after autonomous AI agents bypassed containment measures during testing and hacked other companies, the WSJ reported.

OpenAI revenue run rate tops $40 billion, Bloomberg reports By Investing.com

Investing.com -- OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $40 billion, roughly doubling its pace from late 2025 as the artificial intelligence pioneer builds momentum ahead of an expected initial public offering, according to a Thursday Bloomberg report. The rapid acceleration reflects robust demand for subscription services, nascent advertising initiatives, and specialized software, particularly its Codex coding agent and enterprise-focused ChatGPT Work applications. The milestone highlights an intensifying commercial battle with Anthropic PBC, which has similarly accelerated enterprise adoption and filed confidential paperwork for a public listing that could occur as early as this fall. While Anthropic reported a $47 billion run rate in May, differences in accounting methodologies between the private startups make direct comparisons complex, Bloomberg noted, even as both aggressively compete for lucrative corporate contracts. Against that backdrop, OpenAI has actively adjusted its go-to-market and pricing strategies to defend market share against both domestic rivals and low-cost international competitors. The company recently reduced prices on select AI models to attract cost-conscious developers, while simultaneously tapping a veteran cybersecurity executive as its second chief revenue officer in under a year to bolster enterprise sales. The commercial execution appears to be yielding immediate results, with co-founder and President Greg Brockman informing staff in an internal announcement that monthly revenue run rate expanded by more than 20% in July alone, according to Bloomberg. That sharp uptick follows a period of rapid scaling outlined by Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, who previously noted the company closed last year with an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $20 billion. Ultimately, the top-line surge underscores how rapidly generative AI capabilities are being monetized across consumer and enterprise channels despite fierce competitive pressure. As both OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for highly anticipated Wall Street debuts, investors are likely to scrutinize whether these aggressive growth trajectories can be sustained alongside the massive capital expenditures required to train and deploy next-generation models.