OpenAI is bouncing back from the slump it experienced earlier this year. The company’s quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, driven by strong demand for its recent AI models, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.
If true, that would represent a nearly 50% increase from the $6.7 billion in sales the company reported in the second quarter. This would also mark a considerable increase in its revenue growth rate, which was previously estimated at around 18% between the first and second quarters of the year.
OpenAI’s profitability also appears to have improved, with adjusted operating margin falling from -150% in the second quarter to -109% in the third quarter, the report said.
OpenAI, one of the first to market with AI models, hasn’t really struggled to continue its revenue expansion: 18% growth on top of $5.7 billion in quarterly revenue is huge by any standard, especially compared to most software companies.
But those gains have been overshadowed by rival Anthropic, which has taken the lead in capturing the enterprise market for AI models and recently reported third-quarter revenue of $17 billion. OpenAI’s broader focus helped it attract a large user base and gain popularity early on. It claims to have over a billion users, but it’s safe to assume that most of them are free users or subscribers to its cheaper plans.
Still, the company lags behind Anthropic in corporate catering, a market where manufacturer Claude has gotten ahead of itself, at least in terms of revenue growth.
OpenAI has recently benefited from a combination of tighter pricing, discounts, model improvements and a greater focus on creating more business-focused products and AI agents that can help people complete tasks.
OpenAI has now reached $50 billion in annual revenue, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Anthropic, which is targeting a valuation of $1.4 trillion in an IPO likely to take place soon, said yesterday that its annual revenue rose by $10 billion in a month to reach $81 billion at the end of October.
(Note that OpenAI and Anthropic calculate their annualized revenue differently: Anthropic counts sales made by its cloud partners, while OpenAI only reports its share of certain sales through its partners.)
Of course, none of these numbers are small, but the companies are also competing with models from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as well as a plethora of cheaper but still very capable models from open source AI labs, particularly those in China.
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