The revenue race between Anthropic and OpenAI is getting more heated

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.

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.