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The revenue race between Anthropic and OpenAI is getting more heated

Hey Claude, when do you think you’ll start making more money than ChatGPT?

10/17/25 6:39AM

Whether it’s the ~$1 trillion worth of deals the company’s signed, how it might actually make the money it needs to finance them, or just how tricky it’s become to track the money going in and out of Sam Altman’s business as of late, OpenAI’s financials are under even more scrutiny than usual lately.

This week, however, there’s been time for a little bit of the spotlight to shine on Anthropic’s section of the AI world stage, with reports that the Bezos-backed ChatGPT rival is on track to hit an annual revenue run rate of $9 billion by the end of the year. It was also reported that the Claude maker is almost tripling its annual revenue goals for 2026, which could rise to nearly as much as $26 billion.

While that would make the financial disparity between Anthropic and the behemoth behind ChatGPT and Sora very interesting, the revenue race between the two has already been heating up a little recently.

Anthropic OpenAI revenue race chart — Sherwood News

A lot has changed since Anthropic’s yearly revenue run rate hit $1 billion last December, and even more has shifted since OpenAI reached the same milestone in the summer of 2023, as the companies’ chatbots rack up hundreds of millions of site visits every month.

Though OpenAI’s valuation has soared to $500 billion, making it the world’s most valuable private company and putting it far ahead of Anthropic’s $183 billion figure, the two are closer on revenue than you might expect, with OpenAI’s annual revenue run rate reportedly hitting the $12 billion mark in late July and Anthropic getting to $7 billion this month.

Rani Molla13h

Tesla sales continued to fall in Europe last month — but there were a few bright spots

Tesla’s self-proclaimed “weakest market” continued to look weak in November, as sales mostly kept dropping year over year across European countries, including Sweden, France, and Spain, Reuters reports.

However, there were a couple of notable bright spots for Tesla, which has suffered due to strong competition and an aging lineup. In Norway, as consumers face the end of certain EV subsidies, Tesla sales jumped 175% in November and about 35% for the first 11 months of 2025. Meanwhile, in Italy, sales increased 58% year on year after declining for six months. From January to November, Tesla sales fell 28% there.

Jon Keegan15h

More AI startups are reportedly turning to free Chinese AI models

The biggest tech companies in the world, like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, are racing to build dozens of gigawatts of AI computing infrastructure to meet what they say is incredibly high demand.

But free, open-weight Chinese AI models like DeepSeek and Qwen have been rapidly catching up to the leading frontier models.

According to a report from NBC News, more AI startups are deciding that these Chinese models might be cheap enough and good enough to pass on the state-of-the-art offerings from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. This, of course, would be very bad news for the AI capex orgy that is currently consuming the tech sector.

As the huge, all-purpose models try to do it all, startups are taking advantage of these open-weight models, which can be distilled and customized for specific applications, and usually for a much lower cost.

More of Silicon Valley is building on free Chinese AI

Rani Molla15h

“The Big Short” investor calls Tesla “ridiculously overvalued”

“The Big Short” investor Michael Burry says Tesla’s market cap has been “ridiculously overvalued” for “a good long time.” In his latest Substack post, he criticized what he calls the “tragic algebra” of stock-based compensation, arguing that companies like Tesla understate their true economic cost because, though stock-based comp is a noncash expense under GAAP, it still dilutes shareholders.

Burry wrote that CEO Elon Musk’s compensation package — which could reach $1 trillion — ensures that “dilution is certain to continue.” He estimated Tesla’s share count will expand by roughly 3.6% per year without buybacks — far higher than Amazon’s 1.3% and more comparable to Palantir’s 4.6%. In his view, failing to account for this compounding leaves investors with an overly generous picture of long-term profitability.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Foundations: The Tragic Algebra of Stock-Based Compensation

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jon Keegan16h

Amazon AWS due to roll out its own updated AI models this week

This week in Las Vegas, Amazon AWS is sure to make some news at its re:Invent developer conference.

AWS is the current undisputed cloud computing leader, serving up AI computing services for many of the top players, but most importantly enterprise darling Anthropic.

Last quarter, Amazon reported that AWS revenue grew 20% year on year and it had a $200 billion backlog of contracted business it was racing to fulfill.

But AWS has greater ambitions than being just a cloud provider. Looking toward efficiency and lower costs, AWS has been developing its own AI models, named Nova. The Information reports that this week will see a significant update to Nova, which was described in the report as the company’s first real “all-in-one” multimodal model.

As AWS Preps New AI Models, Relations With Anthropic Get Complicated

Last quarter, Amazon reported that AWS revenue grew 20% year on year and it had a $200 billion backlog of contracted business it was racing to fulfill.

Rani Molla19h

Tesla sold more cars in Norway this year than any automaker ever as buyers get ahead of tax hike

Norway is proving to be a rare bright spot in Europe, Tesla’s “weakest market,” with the EV company setting an annual car sales record in the country, Reuters reports. Tesla sales jumped 175% in Norway in November compared to the same month a year earlier, selling more than 6,000 new cars there as customers race to get ahead of what’s effectively a tax hike on EVs when the country rolls back subsidies.

That brings its year-to-date total sales to a record of 28,606 cars — higher than the previous record set by Volkswagen in 2016 — with a month to spare. Last month, fully electric vehicles made up 97.6% of all new cars sold in Norway.

Meanwhile, Tesla sales continue to languish across much of the rest of Europe. Early figures show double-digit declines in France, Sweden, and Denmark in November. Sales in Spain fell nearly 9% last month. Data from October saw sales halve in both the UK and Germany. Europe is Tesla’s third-biggest market after the US and China.