OpenAI has become the face of the AI revolution, but a company that’s not gone quite as mainstream could end up becoming profitable much sooner.
Anthropic is on track to report a profit much faster than OpenAI, WSJ reports. Anthropic, with its growing numbers of business users, expects to break even for the first time in 2028. In contrast, OpenAI forecasts that it will lose $78 billion in 2028.
Anthropic has reportedly raised its growth forecast by about 13% to 28% over the next three years and expects to generate up to $70 billion in revenue in 2028, up from around $5 billion this year. Anthropic projected that its 2025 revenue from its API business will be roughly twice that of OpenAI’s.
OpenAI, on the other hand, forecasts its operating losses in 2028 willbe roughly three-fourths of revenue, owing to increasing spending on computing costs. OpenAI also expects to burn through approximately 14 times as much cash as Anthropic before turning a profit in 2030.
Anthropic had passed OpenAI in API market share by usage by mid 2025. In 2023, OpenAI had 50% of the market, while Meta was second at 16%. In 2024, Anthropic and Google seemed to gain at the expense of OpenAI, and OpenAI’s share dropped to 34%. By mid 2025, Anthropic had pulled ahead of OpenAI with 32% share, and Google with 20% was nipping at its heels.
And the differences in their profitability timeframes possibly reflects the difference in focus between the two companies. Anthropic has been laser focused on business users, and its coding products are widely thought to be the best in the industry. Also, Anthropic hasn’t allowed itself to be distracted — it has refrained from releasing image or video models which might have consumer uses, but don’t have as many business applications. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is a consumer hit — it is now the fifth most visited website in the world. In addition to its business offerings, it’s been releasing a host of consumer features, like Pulse, and entire consumer apps, like Sora. The payoff for winning big in the consumer space might be bigger than winning in the business space — Google, Facebook and Apple are ultimately consumer-facing companies — but as OpenAI’s financial projections show, this also likely means a much longer and uncertain path to profitability.