Underdog Anthropic Sprints Ahead In AI Race

 

“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 weren't intended to represent a precise annualized revenue run-rate.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 No. 1 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.

 

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.” [1]

 

1. Underdog Anthropic Sprints Ahead In AI Race. Clark, Kate.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 May 2026: A1.