Anthropic, until recently, has had a fraction of the public mindspace as OpenAI, but it isn’t all that far behind in revenue numbers.
A new chart from The Information reveals the annualized revenue trajectories of both companies, and the picture is striking: OpenAI sits at a $25 billion annualized run rate as of early 2026, while Anthropic has reached $19 billion — a gap that, measured in percentage terms, has narrowed dramatically over the past two years.
The chart, titled ‘AI Revenue Duel,’ tracks both companies from October 2023 through early 2026. At the start of that period, OpenAI’s annualized revenues were a multiple of Anthropic’s, with the latter barely registering on the same scale. But from mid-2025 onwards, Anthropic’s curve steepens sharply, reflecting a period of exceptional growth that has brought it within striking distance of the industry’s long-reigning leader.
From Zero To $19 Billion In Two Years
Anthropic’s revenue journey has been one of the fastest in technology history. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei noted in mid-2025 that his company went from zero revenue in 2022, to $100 million in 2023, to $1 billion in 2024, and then to above $4.5 billion in just the first half of 2025. The $19 billion annualized figure that The Information now reports represents yet another step-change in that trajectory — one that Amodei had predicted even as he called himself “conservative” about growth forecasts.
A major engine of that growth has been enterprise adoption. When Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation, the company noted that its number of customers spending over $1 million annually had surged from just a dozen two years prior to over 500. Claude Code, its agentic coding platform, has been a particular standout, generating over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue and seeing weekly active users double since the start of 2026.
The Business Spending Battle: Anthropic Has Already Won
While OpenAI retains a total revenue edge, business subscription data from Ramp Economics Lab tells a different story. Among U.S. businesses tracked by the corporate card platform, Anthropic’s share of combined OpenAI-plus-Anthropic spend has gone from roughly 10% at the start of 2025 to over 65% by February 2026 — meaning Anthropic now commands roughly twice the business subscription spend that OpenAI does within that two-company comparison.
Claude Team, designed for small and mid-sized businesses with shared workspaces and higher usage limits, has been the primary growth engine. Claude’s reputation for producing longer, more nuanced written output has made it a preferred tool in legal, finance, consulting, and communications — sectors where knowledge worker productivity is at a premium.
OpenAI’s Consumer Moat Keeps It Ahead — For Now
OpenAI’s $25 billion run rate is powered primarily by ChatGPT, which remains a phenomenon in its own right. The product has become the fifth most visited website in the world, and the company’s consumer footprint — built across ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business tiers — has benefited from years of brand recognition that Anthropic is only now beginning to accumulate.
OpenAI also benefits from deep integration across the Microsoft ecosystem, and a mature enterprise sales organisation that Anthropic is still building out. Its API market share, while declining, remains significant across the broader developer community.
That said, OpenAI’s enterprise LLM API share has fallen from 50% in 2023 to 25% by mid-2025, according to data from Mento Ventures, while Anthropic has risen from 12% to 32% over the same period — making it the new API market leader. In coding specifically, Anthropic commands a 42% share compared to OpenAI’s 21%.
The Profitability Divergence
Perhaps the most consequential contrast between the two companies is their path to profitability. Reports from late 2025 suggest Anthropic is on track to break even by 2028, when it expects to generate up to $70 billion in revenue. OpenAI, by contrast, forecasts operating losses of approximately $78 billion in 2028, and is not expected to turn a profit until 2030 — burning roughly 14 times as much cash as Anthropic before doing so.
The divergence reflects their strategic choices. Anthropic has deliberately avoided the consumer distractions — image generators, video tools, social features — that OpenAI has pursued alongside ChatGPT. That focus on enterprise and API revenue appears to have yielded a structurally cleaner business even as it generated less headline buzz.
What The Revenue Chart Really Shows
The Information’s ‘AI Revenue Duel’ chart is, on its surface, a scorecard in which OpenAI is still winning. But the more important story is the slope of Anthropic’s curve from mid-2025 onward. If that trajectory holds, the revenue gap could close within the next 12 to 18 months.
Two years ago, Anthropic was a footnote in the AI revenue conversation. Today, it is a $19 billion annualized business growing faster than OpenAI, with stronger enterprise economics, a cleaner path to profitability, and — after its high-profile confrontation with the U.S. government in early 2026 — a brand identity that resonates with both consumers and corporations. The duel is very much still on.