Anthropic's revenue run rate has crossed $30 billion, a leap that has reshuffled the hierarchy of Silicon Valley's AI Labs — and left OpenAI on the defensive heading into a prospective IPO.
At the start of 2025, OpenAI led Anthropic in annualized revenue by $6 billion versus $1 billion, according to self-reported figures from both companies. By early 2026, OpenAI had reached $20 billion. Anthropic hit $9 billion. Then, this week at HumanX 2026 in San Francisco, Anthropic announced its run-rate revenue had surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 — a more than threefold increase in roughly three months. OpenAI, by contrast, disclosed $2 billion per month, or $24 billion annualized, as part of its most recent fundraising round.
The shift was unmistakable inside Moscone Center. "In Vegas last year it felt like OpenAI was the clear winner, and now it seems like Anthropic is miles ahead," Roseanne Winsek of Renegade Partners told Business Insider from the conference floor. "The Anthropic product is so good." Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, was not present at HumanX. But the private sentiment among founders and venture capitalists in San Francisco this week was not kinder: most declined to criticize OpenAI on the record, according to Business Insider, even as they praised Anthropic's trajectory.
The numbers are imprecise and the companies account differently. Anthropic reports revenue on a gross basis, meaning it does not subtract the cut it pays to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. OpenAI uses a net methodology. A Khosla Ventures partner argued in March that comparing the figures directly is "apples to oranges." Both companies declined to comment for this article.
What is not disputed is direction. Anthropic's coding agent, Claude Code, has become what one investor called "a phenomenon." The tool has driven the company's fastest revenue growth on record. At the start of 2025, Anthropic had $1 billion in annualized revenue and OpenAI had $6 billion. Today, the gap has narrowed to the point where the two companies are competing head-to-head for enterprise coding contracts worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each. OpenAI has taken notice: it is redirecting resources toward its own coding tool, Codex, after shutting down its Sora video product.
Both companies are preparing for public offerings before the end of the year. The revenue race matters for valuation and listing terms. Anthropic, valued at $380 billion in its most recent funding round, presents a faster-growing but more concentrated business — API and enterprise accounts for the bulk of its revenue. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, is more diversified but growing more slowly. Investors will have to decide which story they prefer.
Anthropic also used HumanX to announce Mythos, a new model it says is so capable it cannot yet be released publicly without unacceptable cyberattack risk. The announcement reinforced the sense that Anthropic is setting the technical agenda in a way OpenAI has not managed since the GPT-4 era. Whether that lead is durable — or whether OpenAI closes the gap before either company lists — is the question hanging over the rest of the year.
