The AI competition has entered the “ROI decisive period”: Anthropic's revenue surpassed OpenAI for the first time in a single quarter and achieved profit. The latter's revenue increased by 18% but losses increased

The Zhitong Finance App learned that OpenAI told investors that its second-quarter revenue increased 18% compared to the first quarter, but losses widened further. This performance disappointed some shareholders, who had hoped the startup would make more progress in catching up with rival Anthropic.

The company said its revenue grew from $5.7 billion in the first quarter to $6.7 billion in the three months to June. At the same time, its operating margin fell further into the red line of losses, making the company even farther away from profit before the much-anticipated IPO.

In the same period, Anthropic's revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion, surpassing OpenAI's sales for the first time. It also achieved adjusted operating profit of approximately US$559 million and operating margin of approximately 5%. It is estimated that GAAP EBIT will exceed US$1 billion in Q3.

It's unclear what method Anthropic uses to calculate adjusted profits. The company is currently not a listed company, but in past communications with investors, Anthropic has excluded stock compensation from this indicator.

Its annualized revenue (ARR) rose steeply, from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to surpassing $60 billion in July 2026. The core driving force behind the increase in revenue is Claude Code — the ARR of this programming tool broke 1 billion in half a year and reached 2.5 billion in February 2026. It completed about 4% of global GitHub public code submissions, doubling within a month.

Anthropic and OpenAI's “one rise and one drop” in second-quarter results marks that the generative AI industry is accelerating from a simple “scale competition” phase to a new stage of “commercial viability and return on investment (ROI) considerations.”

The analysis points out that the very different situation between OpenAI and Anthropic shows that the competitive landscape in the AI field has changed dramatically since the beginning of this year. The slowdown in ChatGPT's growth, combined with the huge success of Claude Code, a programming tool launched by Anthropic, has forced OpenAI into passivity, forcing it to transform its business and restructure its leadership team.

Just a week ago, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Drether, who had been with OpenAI for less than a year, announced her departure. Since this year, executives such as Brad Lightcap, the former chief operating officer of OpenAI, and Fergie Seymour, once considered a potential successor to the company's CEO Sam Ultman, have left office one after another.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is actively promoting the company's listing. At the beginning of June this year, OpenAI announced that it had secretly submitted the form, and the specific listing schedule has not yet been determined. The listing process may take some time. According to Ultraman's earlier disclosure, the company may go public in 2027.

In contrast, Anthropic's listing progress appears to be one step ahead. The company also secretly submitted IPO-related documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in June and entered a quiet period. According to foreign media sources, Anthropic may go public in October this year.

Furthermore, OpenAI has portrayed an astonishing growth rate to investors and signed huge computing power agreements, provided it has the ability to generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year in the short term. The performance of Nvidia, Oracle, and other tech giants will largely depend on whether OpenAI can deliver on its promises to them.

On August 17, Nvidia announced the latest cooperation with OpenAI and energy developer SB Energy. By 2030, OpenAI has promised to deploy a total of about 12 gigawatts of Nvidia's AI infrastructure (which can be increased to 16 gigawatts if the project is expanded), bringing Nvidia a total computing power business opportunity of about 600 billion US dollars by 2030.