Anthropic and open source models clash OpenAI executives to send “reassurance pills”: July's annualized revenue surpassed the sum of the second quarter

The Zhitong Finance App learned that against the backdrop of continued intensification of competition in the industry, OpenAI management unleashed business confidence for all employees. According to reports, during an internal meeting with employees on Wednesday, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Flair and Board Chairman Brett Taylor praised OpenAI's revenue growth and discussed competition with Anthropic. Flair said that OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in July already exceeded total revenue for the entire second quarter.

“The second quarter was no less impressive,” Flair said at the conference.

Flyer and Taylor said that the increase in performance was mainly due to the release of the GPT-5.6 series model, the launch of the new enterprise ChatGPT Work, and the continued increase in the usage rate of the AI programming tool Codex.

On the eve of a major IPO, OpenAI still needs to prove that its $852 billion valuation has fundamental support. Currently, OpenAI is mired in an industry pattern where multiple competitors are involved. Not only does it have to face competition from leading companies such as Anthropic and Google, a large number of low-cost open source models are being launched one after another, but it also continues to squeeze its market share.

OpenAI is actively attracting new users, especially businesses and developers, to generate revenue to support its infrastructure spending plans, and related expenses are currently highly dependent on external capital.

In February of this year, OpenAI told investors that it plans to achieve a computing power expenditure target of about 600 billion US dollars by 2030. The media reported earlier this week that OpenAI is currently discussing financial support of up to 250 billion US dollars with Nvidia to help it lease a large new AI data center in Ohio.

The rapid rise of competitors is also causing the market to question whether OpenAI's business can continue to grow. Anthropic said in May that annualized revenue exceeded 47 billion US dollars, a sharp jump compared to the full year of 2025 revenue of about 10 billion US dollars, mainly due to the popularity of its Claude Code tools among developers. After completing the latest round of financing in May, Anthropic's valuation reached 965 billion US dollars, surpassing OpenAI to top the global AI startup list.

According to media reports in March, OpenAI's annualized revenue recently surpassed 25 billion US dollars.

Taylor told employees on Wednesday that Anthropic had a strong start to the year, and he acknowledged that OpenAI needed to catch up on the code circuit. But he also said he's encouraged by Codex's growth.

Taylor said at the conference, “Some people who use Claude Code deeply eventually discovered that their bills were getting very expensive, so they started looking for alternatives.”

Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially submitted IPO applications to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June. Both companies did not disclose specific listing dates.