Anonymous sources have put OpenAI’s third-quarter revenue above $10 billion for the first time, attributing the increase to demand for its recent AI models. The unconfirmed figure would be almost 50% higher than the $6.7 billion previously reported for the second quarter.
Those figures would represent a substantial acceleration. Earlier estimates put first-quarter revenue at $5.7 billion and second-quarter revenue at $6.7 billion, an increase of about 18%. The newly described third-quarter performance would therefore be a sharp change in the pace of growth, rather than simply another quarter at the earlier rate.
The same account of OpenAI’s finances puts its adjusted operating margin at -109% in the third quarter, compared with -150% in the second. On that measure, operating losses would remain larger than quarterly revenue despite the improvement. The reported sales growth therefore does not mean the business has reached profitability.
OpenAI was among the first companies to commercialize large AI models, and it was not struggling to grow: 18% growth on a base of $5.7 billion in quarterly revenue is enormous by the standards of most software businesses. The difficulty was that rivals were growing faster. Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest competitor, has taken the lead in the enterprise market for AI models and recently posted quarterly revenue of $17 billion.
OpenAI’s broad consumer strategy helped it establish a large audience early, and the company says its products now have more than a billion users. Its success in building that audience has coexisted with a weaker relative position in enterprise accounts, where Anthropic has recorded faster revenue growth. User totals and corporate revenue measure different parts of that competition.
More recently, OpenAI has combined pricing changes and discounts with improvements to its models and a greater emphasis on enterprise products. That includes AI agents designed to complete work for customers rather than only respond to questions. Anonymous sources put OpenAI’s annual revenue run rate at $50 billion.
Anthropic is pursuing a $1.4 trillion valuation in an initial public offering that is expected to take place soon. It said on Tuesday that its annual revenue run rate rose by $10 billion within a month, reaching $81 billion as of the end of October.
The two companies do not count annualized revenue the same way. Anthropic includes sales made by its cloud partners, while OpenAI reports only its own share of some sales made through partners. The competing totals are therefore not directly comparable.
The figures are large in absolute terms, but both companies face pressure from models built by Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as from a growing supply of cheaper, highly capable models from open-source AI labs, particularly in China.