Anthropic hit a $47 billion annualized revenue run rate, passing OpenAI’s reported $25-33 billion.
The gap is strategy: Anthropic sells to enterprises, OpenAI sells consumer subscriptions.
OpenAI still leads on users, with roughly 1.1 billion ChatGPT monthly actives.
For three years OpenAI was the face of AI. That story just changed. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in self-reported annual revenue, hitting a $47 billion run rate by May 2026, with OpenAI’s revenue sitting between $25 billion and $33 billion, as reported by Fortune on July 2, 2026.
How Anthropic pulled ahead
This was not about brand recognition or user counts. It was about who pays and how much. Anthropic earns roughly 85% of its revenue from enterprise and developer customers who use Claude through APIs, while OpenAI earns roughly 85% from ChatGPT consumer subscriptions. One company sells to businesses on large recurring contracts. The other sells monthly plans to individuals.
The growth curve is almost hard to believe. Just 12 months ago Anthropic’s annualised revenue stood at around $1 billion. By the end of 2025 it hit $9 billion, then surged to $30 billion in April 2026, before passing $47 billion in May. The engine behind it is Claude Code, the agentic coding assistant that took over developer workflows.
AI analyst Francesco Ciulla summed up the mood on X:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2075114431462207817
What it means and where the risk sits
The valuation tells the same story. A $65 billion Series H round pushed Anthropic’s valuation to $965 billion, overtaking OpenAI’s last reported $852 billion and making it the most valuable privately held AI company in the world.
But read this fairly, because OpenAI is not losing everywhere. OpenAI still leads on total users, with ChatGPT’s roughly 1.1 billion monthly actives dwarfing Claude’s smaller, more commercially focused base, and on total capital raised. The split reflects two different bets: Anthropic optimizes for revenue per user, OpenAI optimizes for reach.
Profitability may be the real dividing line. Anthropic reported profitability in Q4 2025 and projects sustainable profitability by 2029, while OpenAI has not reached profitability and has not given a timeline. With both companies eyeing IPOs this year, the question has shifted from who builds the smartest model to who builds a model businesses cannot afford to drop.
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