Anthropic Has Now Surpassed OpenAI In Valuation and Revenue Run Rate

Fast follower Anthropic has surpassed first-to-market - and arch rival - OpenAI - on two key metrics which suggest that Anthropic may, for now, be emerging as the AI firm to beat. 

In revenue run rate, an annual extrapolation of currently monthly sales, Anthropic is expected to hit $50 billion by next month, whereas OpenAI was at $24 billion a month ago, the last figures available. In terms of investors' valuation of the two companies, Anthropic is now valued at $900 billion, which puts ahead of OpenAI for the first time. While the competition is far from over, Anthropic's focus on coding and business users versus consumers appears to be the crucial differentiator in its favor. JL

Kate Clark reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Anthropic's  revenue-run rate, a figure that forecasts annual revenue based on short-term sales, is on track to reach $50 billon by the end of next month. The run-rate topped $30 billion in April. The company had planned for growth to increase 10-fold this year, but saw 80-fold growth in the first quarter. OpenAI said in late March that its revenue reached $24 billion on an annualized basis. Data suggests Anthropic’s growth continues to accelerate (while) OpenAI’s has begun to plateau. Anthropic has received investment offers in recent months valuing it at more than $900 billion. That would more than double the company’s current valuation and surpass OpenAI’s for the first time. Anthropic caught up by focusing on developing a handful of products rather than trying to dominate every corner of the market, and its success with coding users and businesses has reset the AI race on its terms.

Anthropic is emerging as the presumptive front-runner in the race for artificial-intelligence supremacy, with faster growth and fundraising that could soon yield a higher valuation than rival OpenAI.

Once a scrappy underdog in a race that OpenAI appeared to have already won, the gap between the two companies has narrowed significantly this year, with new data suggesting Anthropic’s growth continues to accelerate rapidly. OpenAI’s, by some indications, has begun to plateau.

Anthropic has received investment offers in recent months valuing it at more than $900 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. That would more than double the company’s current valuation and surpass OpenAI’s for the first time. Earlier this year, OpenAI raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation.

Anthropic's revenue-run rate, a figure commonly used by startups that forecasts annual revenue based on short-term sales, is on track to reach $50 billon by the end of next month, according to figures shared with investors. Their run-rate topped $30 billion in April, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company had planned for growth to increase 10-fold this year, but it saw 80-fold growth in annualized revenue and usage in the first quarter.

OpenAI said in late March that its revenue had reached $2 billion a month, or $24 billion on an annualized basis, though the figures aren’t perfectly comparable because Anthropic counts sales through cloud partners as revenue, while OpenAI doesn’t. A spokesman for OpenAI said the monthly revenue data shared in March wasn’t intended to represent a precise annualized revenue run-rate.

Anthropic organized a workshop in San Francisco earlier this month.

In data released Wednesday, finance startup Ramp said more of its customers used Anthropic’s models than OpenAI’s for the first time, with 34.4% using Anthropic versus 32.3% using OpenAI. Adoption of Anthropic’s Claude tools jumped 3.8% from March to April, while OpenAI adoption fell 2.9%, according to the data. Ramp analyzes the spend of approximately 50,000 customers to track AI adoption trends.

“We’ve seen time and time again in this market that a large dominant player can be unseated in a matter of a couple months,” said Ara Kharazian, lead economist in Ramp’s economics lab. “Anthropic has just done that.”

An OpenAI spokesman said the Ramp figures offer an incomplete picture of business customers because large enterprise clients don’t pay for software services through credit cards. Bloomberg earlier reported on Anthropic’s fundraising offers. 

The AI race is far from over, and both companies face challenges, including the looming threat of Google. For Anthropic in particular, computing constraints have caused outages and forced it to throttle users, while OpenAI’s Codex is rapidly gaining popularity, adding pressure as Anthropic struggles to keep pace with its own growth.

Before this year, OpenAI had long been seen as the default front-runner in the AI race, and its ChatGPT chatbot still maintains a sizable lead over Anthropic’s Claude in overall users.

Anthropic has caught up by focusing on developing a handful of products rather than trying to dominate every corner of the market, and its success with coding users and businesses has reset the AI race on its terms. 

Doing more with less

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who clashed with OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.

Early on, Dario Amodei was conflicted about turning Anthropic’s AI research into a commercial venture, and turned to wealthy philanthropists in the effective altruism movement for early funding.

In the summer of 2022, Anthropic decided not to release an early version of its Claude chatbot after employees objected, fearing it would start a dangerous technology race.

At the same time, the startup’s ties to effective altruism came under scrutiny because of its connections to disgraced cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud. The relationship made it a pariah to many mainstream investors, while OpenAI rocketed ahead after releasing ChatGPT in late 2022, quickly becoming the industry’s anointed winner and attracting a flood of capital.

Anthropic, forced into a more disciplined state, focused its efforts on building AI tools for business customers.

Back then, “there wasn’t billions of dollars showing up,” Anthropic investor Divesh Makan, founder of Iconiq, said in an earlier interview. “They had to always wake up thinking, how do I do more with less?”

Leading indicators

Anthropic’s growth accelerated sharply in late 2025, around the release of Claude Opus 4.5, a model whose coding capabilities helped drive a surge in adoption of Claude Code, a software tool that works in conjunction with Anthropic’s top AI model. Over the holidays, developers and AI enthusiasts spent hours tinkering with the tool and said they were “Claude-pilled,” or addicted to the product. 

Growth picked up even more upon the release of Cowork, Anthropic’s agentic tool for nontechnical tasks, in January.

A Claude Cowork demonstration taking place at Anthropic’s workshop in San Francisco earlier this month.

Still, OpenAI continues to dwarf Anthropic in consumer reach. OpenAI said in February that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users.

ChatGPT has continued to significantly outpace Claude in weekly U.S. downloads, though for a brief period in March, Claude sprinted ahead.

On March 2, for the first time, Claude surpassed ChatGPT in weekly U.S. downloads, according to data from Sensor Tower, a web-data firm. Around the same time, U.S. app uninstalls for ChatGPT jumped 295%, which Sensor Tower linked to backlash over OpenAI’s deal with the Defense Department.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of a new fundraising round and, later, an initial public offering, bids, asks and trading activity for Anthropic shares have surged on the secondary market.

On Augment, a private-stock marketplace, trades of Anthropic shares tripled in the first quarter compared with the fourth, placing Anthropic at the number one spot for the first time.

During the same period, OpenAI’s secondary value fell 22% on Augment’s marketplace and trading activity was flat.

“Two AI leads. Opposite directions. Same quarter,” Augment wrote in a blog post.

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