Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in key financial metric - Jefferies
Anthropic outpaced OpenAI in annual revenue growth, Jefferies pointed out / Photo: Yalcin Sonat / Shutterstock.com
The current revenue rate of AI company Anthropic, which has developed the Claude chatbot, is higher than that of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Jefferies estimates. Analysts believe that Anthropic's agreement with Google will allow the company to cope with the increased demand.
Anthropic reported that its revenue run rate, which reflects revenue estimates for the coming year if current trends continue, exceeded $30 billion amid a sharp increase in demand for Claude's services. The revenue run rate was $9 billion at the end of 2025, and the number of the company's enterprise customers with annual spending of more than $1 million rose from February's 500 to 1,000. To keep up with demand, Anthropic has partnered with Google and Broadcom to scale its AI infrastructure. We are talking about about 3.5 GW of computing power based on TPU chips.
OpenAI, on the other hand, generates about $2 billion in revenue per month, which "probably implies" a lag behind Anthropic in terms of annualized revenue pace, Jefferies analyst Brent Till noted. That said, OpenAI is ahead of the competition in terms of scale, Till said. Sam Altman's company has more than 900 million weekly users and significant capital and capacity. To secure them, OpenAI is pursuing opportunities much more aggressively, MarketWatch points out. Last year, the company signed agreements to invest $1.4 trillion in cloud infrastructure, but later scaled back plans to $600 billion by 2030, CNBC recalls.
It raised $122 billion last week, reaching a valuation of $852 billion.Anthropic's last valuation was $380 billion.
Anthropic's dramatic growth reinforces investor concerns that AI spending is "crowding out budgets" for traditional software, says a Jefferies analyst. In just three months, the company was able to grow revenue comparable to one-third of the revenue growth of the entire software sector from Jefferies' 2025 coverage (excluding Microsoft). At the same time, the investment bank estimates that 77% of software vendors are expected to experience a slowdown in sales growth in 2026. "This acceleration will fuel the narrative that Anthropic and OpenAI are eating up all IT budgets," Till warned.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
