Investors weigh OpenAI strengths against Anthropic growth

Anthropic’s filing reports $16.3 billion in first-half revenue, setting a benchmark for OpenAI ahead of any rival public offering.

The figure covers the opening half of 2026 and represents a 1,300% increase from the corresponding period a year earlier, according to Anthropic’s registration statement. For investors comparing the companies, the question extends beyond sales growth to whether their different customer bases can support profitable businesses.

OpenAI has not supplied a comparable prospectus in the material available. Assessments of its finances therefore rest on executive remarks and investor expectations rather than equivalent disclosures, limiting any direct comparison of revenue quality or profitability.

Anthropic cautions against extrapolating revenue

Anthropic’s filing records annual revenue of $4.6 billion for 2025, compared with $386 million in 2024 and $41 million in 2023. That sequence establishes the scale of its expansion, but it does not establish how much revenue ultimately becomes profit.

The company explicitly cautions against extending that trajectory indefinitely. “We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all,” Anthropic says in its filing.

Anthropic attributes its expansion to an immature market and an initial wave of customer adoption. Its warning separates the opportunity to win new users from the harder question of maintaining growth once that early expansion subsides.

Pricing adds another uncertainty: the supplied reporting describes discounts at both companies alongside Anthropic’s commitments to computing capacity. If lower prices reduce revenue per unit of usage faster than operating costs fall, additional demand would not necessarily improve margins.

Jonathan Tower, founder and managing partner at venture firm Catapult, cautioned against treating a large addressable market as evidence of attractive investment returns. “My broader concern is that investors are confusing the magnitude of the AI opportunity with the profitability of its participants.”

OpenAI’s consumer reach broadens the comparison

OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told investors in August that business customers had overtaken consumers as a revenue source, according to the supplied reporting. Without matching financial statements, that comment indicates a change in customer mix rather than a measurable profitability advantage.

OpenAI is also developing advertising within ChatGPT and a hardware offering with Jony Ive. Those initiatives represent additional commercial channels, but the material provides no comparable earnings figures showing how much either contributes to the business.

Anthropic acknowledges the competitive relevance of consumer distribution in its filing. It warns that rivals with broader audiences and more established customer connections could use those relationships to compete for corporate accounts, while saying a matching consumer push falls outside its current resource plans.

If consumer relationships help OpenAI acquire business customers at lower cost, its broader distribution could strengthen its enterprise economics and pressure competitors to reconsider their sales strategies. That remains a conditional advantage, not a demonstrated margin difference.

If discounts instead intensify without sufficient cost savings, both companies could face pressure on returns even as usage expands. Any subsequent restraint in computing purchases could also affect infrastructure suppliers, although the material provides no basis for quantifying a wider economic effect.

A future OpenAI prospectus would give investors a firmer basis for evaluating those alternatives. Comparable disclosures on margins, customer concentration and computing obligations would help distinguish rapid adoption from a durable financial model.