Anthropic Beats OpenAI in Revenue for First Time

Anthropic's sales surpassed those of OpenAI in the second quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on August 18. The report, citing unnamed sources, stated that Anthropic's revenue reached $11.6 billion, more than doubling from $11.6 billion during the same period last year. In contrast, OpenAI reported revenue of $6.7 billion for the same period, with losses deepening.

The WSJ attributed Anthropic's revenue growth to its Claude Code coding tool, which has seen continued success. Meanwhile, OpenAI's growth was noted to have accelerated following the launch of new AI models in July, though the company's second quarter revenue growth was 18% compared to the previous quarter. OpenAI did not immediately respond to PYMNTS' request for comment on the report.

According to Bloomberg, Anthropic's preliminary revenue figure for the second quarter was over $11.5 billion, with positive adjusted operating income. The report highlighted that Anthropic's growth is occurring as the company competes with OpenAI for enterprise customers. The AI coding assistants developed by Anthropic and other companies like Meta and Google are making it possible for smaller teams to perform tasks that would otherwise require significant resources, thus cutting development time and enabling faster product launches.

DeepSeek is also targeting the agentic coding market, similar to Anthropic and OpenAI. Both companies have filed confidential paperwork to go public, with Anthropic expected to do so as early as this fall.