OpenAI's Sales Lag Behind Its Rival

“OpenAI told investors its revenue grew by 18% from the first to the second quarter, while its losses deepened, results that disappointed some shareholders who had hoped the startup would show more progress catching up to its rival, Anthropic.

 

The company said its revenue grew to $6.7 billion in the three months ended in June, up from $5.7 billion in the first quarter. Meanwhile, its operating margin sank further into the red, pushing the company further away from profitability ahead of a much-anticipated initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said.

 

Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion in the same period, marking the first time its sales surpassed its older rival. The company also swung to a small operating profit.

 

The two companies' diverging fortunes show just how drastically the artificial-intelligence race has shifted since the beginning of the year. A slowdown in the growth of ChatGPT, combined with the success of Anthropic's hit coding tool, Claude Code, has put OpenAI on its back foot, forcing the company to pivot its business and overhaul its leadership team.

 

Last week, the company replaced its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after she spent less than a year on the job. Her departure followed a string of other exits, including former Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, once seen as the heir apparent to CEO Sam Altman.

 

OpenAI has told investors that its growth rate has picked up since the launch of a set of new models in July, the people said.

 

For many startups, nearly $7 billion in quarterly revenue would be extraordinary, but the expectations are different for OpenAI. The company has sold investors on a stratospheric pace of growth and signed large computing deals premised on its ability to soon generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year.

 

The performance of Nvidia, Oracle and other tech giants hinges on OpenAI's ability to make good on its commitments to them.

 

OpenAI's sequential rate of growth was slower than Palantir's over the same period and behind other AI highfliers such as CoreWeave and Micron.

 

OpenAI recently released a "super app" that integrates its coding tool, Codex, with ChatGPT and a web browser and has said that the new product is attracting users quickly.

 

In recent months, its co-founder and president, Greg Brockman, has also taken a more active role leading the product and business divisions in an effort to reaccelerate growth.

 

The operating loss widened from $9.3 billion in the first quarter to $12.3 billion in the second quarter, outpacing its revenue growth. Anthropic, by contrast, managed to eke out an adjusted profit, telling investors that it had made progress in how efficiently it uses computing resources.

 

It is unclear what methods Anthropic, which isn't yet a public company, used to calculate its adjusted profit, although in past communications with investors, it has excluded stock-based compensation from the figure.

 

OpenAI subsidizes hundreds of millions of users who don't pay for ChatGPT and also cut the prices for two of its latest models after corporate customers began to grow more cautious about their spending on AI tools and shifted more tasks to cheaper Chinese models.

 

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

 

1. OpenAI's Sales Lag Behind Its Rival. Berber, Jin; Driebusch, Corrie.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Aug 2026: B1.