The AI race has a new revenue leader. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate has rocketed past OpenAI’s, with projections now pointing toward a $43-45 billion figure by late Q2 2026, compared to OpenAI’s roughly $24-25 billion.
To put that in perspective: Anthropic was sitting at $9 billion in annualized revenue at the end of 2025. By April 2026, that number had tripled to $30 billion.
The numbers behind the surge
OpenAI was reportedly pulling in around $2 billion per month in early 2026, translating to that $24-25 billion annualized figure. Anthropic blew past that mark in April, and the gap appears to be widening rather than narrowing.
The primary engine behind this growth is enterprise adoption of Claude models and Anthropic’s API services. While OpenAI built its brand on consumer-facing products like ChatGPT, Anthropic has been quietly locking in the kind of business contracts that generate predictable, high-volume revenue streams.
