According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic is gradually becoming the recognized front-runner in the battle for AI supremacy. With faster growth and the ability to raise capital, its valuation may soon surpass that of rival OpenAI.


Two of Anthropic’s founders worked at OpenAI

In this competition, OpenAI once seemed to be a sure winner, while Anthropic was just a weak challenger struggling to catch up. But the gap between the two companies has narrowed significantly this year. New data suggests Anthropic's growth continues to accelerate. Some indicators show that OpenAI's growth has begun to level off.

Catching up with OpenAI

According to people familiar with the matter, Anthropic has received multiple investment offers in recent months, valuing it at more than $900 billion. This would more than double the company's current valuation and surpass OpenAI for the first time. Earlier this year, OpenAI raised $122 billion at a valuation of $852 billion.

The company's revenue run rate, a metric commonly used by startups to predict annual revenue based on short-term sales, is expected to hit $50 billion by the end of next month, according to data Anthropic disclosed to investors. In April this year, its revenue run rate exceeded $30 billion, compared with $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company originally planned to achieve 10x growth this year, but in the first quarter, its annualized revenue and usage increased 80x.

OpenAI said at the end of March that its revenue had reached US$2 billion per month, or approximately US$24 billion annually. However, due to different statistical calibers, this data is not completely comparable. Anthropic counts sales through cloud service partners as revenue, while OpenAI does not. An OpenAI spokesperson said the monthly revenue figures released in March were not intended to represent a precise annualized revenue run rate.

Fintech startup Ramp said in data released on Wednesday that the number of its customers using Anthropic models exceeded those using OpenAI models for the first time, with 34.4% of customers using Anthropic compared to 32.3% using OpenAI. Data shows that from March to April, the usage rate of Anthropic's Claude tool increased by 3.8%, while the usage rate of OpenAI dropped by 2.9%. Ramp analyzed the spending of about 50,000 customers to track AI application trends.


Anthropic is used by more Ramp customers than OpenAI

"We've seen time and time again in this market that a large, dominant player can be displaced in just a few months. Anthropic just did that," said Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp Economics Lab.

A spokesman for OpenAI said Ramp's data does not fully reflect the situation of enterprise customers, because large enterprise customers do not pay for software services through credit cards.

Counterattack magic weapon

Before this year, OpenAI had been regarded as the "default front-runner" in the AI ​​race, and its ChatGPT chatbot was still significantly ahead of Anthropic's Claude in overall user scale.

Anthropic has been able to catch up because it focused on developing a few products rather than trying to dominate every corner of the market. Its success with programming users and enterprise customers has allowed it to reshape the AI ​​competitive landscape at its own pace.

After the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, OpenAI took off rapidly, quickly becoming a recognized winner in the industry and attracting a large influx of capital.

Anthropic, meanwhile, became involved with disgraced cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud. This relationship has made it a pariah in the eyes of many mainstream investors.

This has led Anthropic to develop in a more "constrained" environment, forcing it to adopt a more restrained strategy and focus on developing AI tools for enterprise customers.

Divesh Makan, an investor in Anthropic and founder of investment company Iconiq, said in a previous interview that "billions of dollars of capital were not pouring in" at that time. "They have to always think about: How to do more with less resources?".


Claude

At the end of 2025, Anthropic's growth accelerated dramatically with the release of Claude Opus 4.5. The model's increased programming capabilities have fueled a surge in the use of Claude Code, a software tool that works with its flagship model. Developers and AI enthusiasts spent a lot of time playing with the tool over the holidays and said they were "addicted to Claude."

In January this year, with the release of Anthropic's agent tool Cowork for non-technical tasks, its growth momentum further accelerated.

Still, OpenAI far outpaces Anthropic in terms of consumer reach. OpenAI said in February that ChatGPT’s weekly active users had reached 900 million. In terms of weekly application downloads in the US market, ChatGPT has been significantly ahead of Claude for a long time, but was briefly overtaken in March.

According to data from network data company Sensor Tower, on March 2, Claude surpassed ChatGPT for the first time in weekly downloads in the United States. Around the same time, ChatGPT saw a 295% surge in app uninstalls in the United States, which Sensor Tower attributed to user backlash caused by OpenAI’s partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense.

At the same time, against the backdrop of market expectations that Anthropic is about to conduct a new round of financing and subsequently launch an IPO, Anthropic shares have seen a significant increase in buying, selling and trading activities in the secondary market. On the private equity trading platform Augment, the trading volume of Anthropic stock in the first quarter tripled compared with the fourth quarter of last year, ranking first in terms of trading activity on the platform for the first time.

During the same period, OpenAI's secondary market valuation on the Augment platform fell by 22%, while trading activity remained basically the same.

“Two AI leaders moved in completely opposite directions in the same quarter,” Augment wrote in a blog post.