Revenue Soars Fivefold Surpassing OpenAI, Anthropic Generates $45 Billion in Annual Revenue and Achieves Profitability

According to Watchtower Beating monitoring, the latest financial data shows that Anthropic's annualized revenue has skyrocketed to nearly $45 billion, achieving a five-fold surge in the first five months of 2026 alone, and surpassing OpenAI by about 35%. In contrast, OpenAI's annual revenue growth has significantly slowed down, remaining in the $30 billion to $33 billion range. At the end of last year, Anthropic's annual revenue was only $9 billion, less than half of OpenAI's. The recent overtaking has not only shocked the industry but also added a huge variable to the upcoming first-time public listings (IPOs) showdown between the two companies.

Even more dramatic is the profit levels of the two companies. Thanks to strong demand from enterprise clients for high-priced services, Anthropic is expected to achieve $559 million in operating profit in the second quarter, with an operating margin of 5%, turning losses into profits ahead of others. In contrast, OpenAI is mired in a severe loss quagmire. Due to the burden of billions of dollars in server rental costs and the support of hundreds of millions of free users, OpenAI's operating margin in the first quarter was -122%, equivalent to a net loss of at least $7 billion in a single quarter, with an annual cash burn budget as high as $25 billion.

The difference in business structures also highlights the trump cards of both sides. Anthropic focuses on selling code writing and white-collar automation tools to enterprises, even allowing the distribution revenue from cloud service providers to be consolidated. In contrast, apart from having to permanently surrender 20% of its revenue to Microsoft, OpenAI also has to scale back high-energy-consuming projects like the Sora video model to save costs. OpenAI's CFO Sarah Friar has expressed concerns to CEO Sam Altman about the rushed IPO, but facing the financially stronger and profit-leading Anthropic, which is relentlessly catching up, being the first to go public and raise funds in the stock market might be OpenAI's only choice.