Anthropic passes OpenAI on revenue for the first time
The AI race has a new revenue leader. For the first time, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in quarterly revenue — a milestone that reshapes the competitive landscape just as OpenAI prepares for its IPO.
Anthropic hit $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, roughly doubling from the first quarter, while OpenAI reported $6.7 billion — up 18 percent from $5.7 billion in Q1. That puts Anthropic nearly 73 percent ahead of OpenAI on the topline, a gap that would have seemed implausible even twelve months ago. Anthropic also posted a small operating profit, while OpenAI's margins slid further into the red, keeping the company unprofitable ahead of an expected public offering.
The numbers come from the same Wall Street Journal report we covered yesterday, when we focused on OpenAI's slowing growth and sinking margins. The Anthropic side of that report tells the more dramatic story. Anthropic says its annualized revenue rate has reached $65 billion, seven times what it was a year ago. Claude Code — the company's AI-powered coding assistant — has been the primary growth engine, pulling developers onto Anthropic's platform and keeping them there. Vercel data suggests Anthropic earns roughly 4.4 times more per API use than the industry average, a pricing advantage that compounds as usage scales.
OpenAI is not standing still. The company told investors that growth accelerated after the July launch of GPT-5.6, its latest frontier model. But the quarter's results will intensify questions about whether OpenAI's consumer-first strategy — billions of ChatGPT users paying modest subscription fees — can compete with Anthropic's developer-and-enterprise model, where fewer customers spend significantly more. The gap is not just about revenue; it's about the business model itself. Anthropic has found a way to monetize AI usage at a premium, while OpenAI is still trying to convert massive consumer scale into sustainable margins.
What to watch: whether OpenAI's GPT-5.6 bounce is enough to close the gap in Q3, and how Anthropic's profitability trajectory shapes its own IPO timeline. If the roles stay reversed, the narrative around the AI race's "winner" will shift for the first time since ChatGPT launched.
Is the developer-first model permanently more profitable than the consumer-first approach, or is this a temporary gap that scale will close? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: The Decoder · MIT Technology Review
