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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 7:39AM

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.

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Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5