Anthropic Beats OpenAI in Revenue for First Time
Anthropic’s sales topped those of OpenAI for the first time in the second quarter, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (Aug. 18), citing figures obtained from unnamed sources.
OpenAI told investors that its revenue grew by 18% in the second quarter, compared to the first, while its losses deepened. The company’s second quarter revenue reached $6.7 billion, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
OpenAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
According to the WSJ report, Anthropic more than doubled its revenue over the same period and made a small operating profit. The company’s second quarter revenue reached $11.6 billion.
The report attributed the second quarter results to OpenAI’s ChatGPT seeing a slowdown in growth, while Anthropic’s Claude Code coding tool saw continued success.
OpenAI told investors that its growth rate has accelerated during the current quarter, following the launch of new AI models in July, according to the report.
Bloomberg reported Friday (Aug. 14) that Anthropic shared with would-be investors that its preliminary revenue figure for the second quarter was more than $11.5 billion and that it earned positive adjusted operating income.
Anthropic’s second quarter revenue marked a greater than 14-fold increase compared to the $787 million it earned during the same quarter in 2025.
Bloomberg noted that Anthropic’s growth is happening as the company is competing with OpenAI for enterprise customers. Anthropic had been an underdog in the race between the two companies, but has since enjoyed a wave of corporate adoption of its products for uses like coding.
PYMNTS reported in June 2025 that AI coding assistants enable smaller teams to do tasks that would cost a lot more and require additional engineers, and they cut development time for businesses to bring products to market faster.
On Aug. 5, PYMNTS reported that several companies, including OpenAI, Meta and Google, have been working to expand and enhance their offerings in AI coding. On Wednesday (Aug. 12), it was reported that DeepSeek is also targeting the agentic coding market.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidential paperwork to go public, and Anthropic is expected to reach the market as soon as this fall, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Aug. 13).
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