According to people familiar with the matter, as of the end of last month, OpenAIAnnual revenue has exceeded US$25 billion. That’s a 17% increase from annualized revenue of $21.4 billion at the end of last year, the person and another person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI's revenue is still higher than that of its rival Anthropic, but the gap between the two giants is closing quickly:
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar
Anthropic's annualized revenue recently exceeded $19 billion, nearly three times higher than the end of last year and 36% higher than two weeks ago.
OpenAI’s annualized revenue is calculated as revenue over the past four weeks × 12. According to one of the people, OpenAI's annualized revenue will reach about $30 billion if calculated based only on the level after last week's surge in revenue.
Anthropic has achieved great success with its AI models focusing on code generation, quickly closing the revenue gap with OpenAI. In 2025, OpenAI’s revenue will still be about three times that of Anthropic.
ChatGPT contributes most of OpenAI’s revenue, but the company expects that the proportion of revenue from enterprise customers and new products such as advertising will continue to increase in the future. For example, OpenAI is in talks to partner with ad tech company The Trade Desk to expand its advertiser base.
In addition, OpenAI’s coding tool Codex’s weekly active users have quadrupled since the beginning of the year, reaching 2 million at the end of last month. Anthropic's fellow product Claude Code has also seen rapid growth over the past two months, driving revenue higher.
In recent years, the actual revenue of both companies has significantly exceeded the expectations given to investors. The latest data shows that companies will continue to grow faster than expected this year as they increase spending on AI technologies such as code generation.
The coding assistants and various automated office AI agents launched by the two companies have continued to impact the stock market in recent months, especially enterprise software stocks that investors believe may be replaced by AI.
OpenAI recently raised its revenue forecast for the next five years and plans to achieve revenue of US$284 billion by 2030. However, it also raised its capital consumption forecast and is expected to invest US$665 billion in server-related expenditures by the end of 2030.
Although both companies expect to spend tens of billions of dollars in investment in cloud servers and chips in the next few years, rapid revenue growth is expected to push them to launch IPOs as soon as this year. (OpenAI has chosen a venue for its proposed IPO, The Information reports.)
Both companies are in talks with the U.S. Department of Defense over the military use of AI, and their differences have become public. Last Friday, after the Department of Defense announced the termination of cooperation with Anthropic, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated in an internal memo that the agreement reached between OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman and the military was just a "security show" and did not address core issues such as the use of AI to monitor American people and autonomous weapons.
If the Department of Defense upholds this decision, Anthropic could lose some revenue from U.S. federal agencies.
OpenAI doesn’t expect to become cash flow positive until 2030, two years later than Anthropic expected.
In terms of user data, as of the end of February, ChatGPT had about 920 million weekly active users, an increase of about 10 million from a few weeks ago, but it has still not reached the goal of breaking through 1 billion users by the end of 2025. GPT‑5, launched last summer, has slowed down user growth to some extent due to feedback from some users that its interaction style is more “cold” than GPT‑4o.
Google Gemini has also caused concern within OpenAI. The company launched a “red alert” at the end of last year to refocus resources on improving the competitiveness of its own chatbots.