OpenAI Tops $25 Billion in Annualized Revenue as Anthropic Narrows Gap
OpenAI topped $25 billion in annualized revenue as of the end of last month, according to a person familiar with the figure. That’s a 17% increase from the $21.4 billion in annualized revenue the company was generating at the end of the year, according to the person and a second person with knowledge of the figures.
OpenAI is still generating more revenue than its younger rival Anthropic, though the difference between the archrivals has been narrowing: Anthropic’s annualized revenue recently topped $19 billion, up nearly three times from the end of last year, and up 36% from just two weeks ago.
OpenAI calculates annualized revenue by multiplying the last four weeks’ revenue by 12. If OpenAI calculated the metric based on revenue spikes just in the last week, OpenAI’s annualized revenue would be roughly $30 billion, one of the people said.
Anthropic’s recent success in selling AI models that handle coding tasks has helped it quickly shrink its revenue gap with OpenAI. In 2025, OpenAI generated about three times more revenue than Anthropic.
While ChatGPT contributes the vast majority of OpenAI revenue, the company expects an increasing portion of its revenue will come from business customers as well as new products, such as advertising. OpenAI has been in talks with ad tech firm The Trade Desk on a partnership that could expand its advertising clients, for instance.
OpenAI’s coding agent Codex, meanwhile, quadrupled its weekly active users from the start of the year to 2 million at the end of last month, said the person. Anthropic’s rival product Claude Code has also grown rapidly in the past couple of months, boosting revenue, the company has said.
In recent years, both companies blew past the revenue projections they shared with investors. The recent figures suggest they will do so again this year, as businesses increase their spending on the technology, including for coding tasks.
The companies’ release of coding and other agents that automate white-collar tasks have rocked the equity markets in recent months, especially stocks of enterprise software firms that investors believe could be vulnerable as workers adopt AI tools.
While both companies recently projected they would each burn tens of billions of dollars over the next couple of years as they spend more to rent cloud servers and chips to develop their technology, the revenue growth surge could propel their respective initial public offerings as soon as this year. (OpenAI recently selected law firms for its proposed IPO, The Information reported.)
Both have also been negotiating with the Pentagon over military use of their AI, and their differing positions have spilled into public view. On Friday, after the Pentagon moved to cut ties with Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei said in an internal memo that the deal OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman struck with the agency was “safety theater” that didn’t resolve key questions about how the technology might be used in surveillance of Americans and to operate autonomous weapons, The Information reported.
If the Pentagon sticks with its decision, Anthropic could lose some revenue from federal government agencies.
OpenAI recently hiked its revenue forecasts for the next five years—with plans to generate as much as $284 billion in revenue in 2030—but it also raised its forecasts for cash burn, predicting it would spend $665 billion in server-related costs through the end of the decade. It doesn’t expect to turn cash flow positive until 2030, two years after Anthropic has projected it would generate cash. (See details of Anthropic’s projections here.)
The number of ChatGPT users grew to about 920 million weekly active users at the end of February, according to the person. That’s a gain of roughly 10 million from a few weeks earlier, though it’s still short of its goal of getting 1 billion users by the end of 2025. The company’s release last summer of GPT-5, which generated complaints from some users over its colder personality than its predecessor GPT-4o, appeared to contribute to the growth slowdown.
Google’s Gemini also has sparked concern inside OpenAI, which late last year declared a code red to refocus its energies on boosting the chatbot.