Anthropic overtakes OpenAI on revenue in race to IPO

Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI on annualised revenue for the first time, the company disclosed on 28 May 2026, as both AI giants race toward stock market listings that could reshape the technology sector. Anthropic reported a $47 billion revenue run rate alongside a landmark $65 billion Series H funding round, while OpenAI's equivalent figure stands at $25 billion — itself a remarkable number, but now trailing its younger rival.

The revenue race: how Anthropic got here so fast

The speed of Anthropic's ascent is almost difficult to parse. The company reported just $87 million in annualised recurring revenue in January 2024. By December that year it had reached $1 billion. It ended 2025 at $9 billion, then accelerated sharply: $14 billion in February 2026, $19 billion in March, $30 billion in April, and $47 billion by late May — surpassing Salesforce, the world's largest pure-play software company, which runs at roughly $41 billion.

The primary engine behind that growth is Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant. Launched in general availability in May 2025, it reached $1 billion in annualised revenue within six months — a milestone that took GitHub Copilot, the previous category leader, approximately three years to hit. By May 2026, Claude Code's annualised revenue had reached approximately $8 billion. According to VentureBeat's coverage of Anthropic's Code with Claude conference, CEO Dario Amodei told attendees the company had planned for 10x annual growth and instead saw 80x, annualised, in Q1 2026, with API volume up nearly 70x year on year.

Claude Code now commands 54% of the AI coding market according to multiple analyst reports, and accounts for 4% of all public GitHub commits worldwide. Enterprise customers including Netflix, Spotify, KPMG, L'Oréal, and Salesforce are listed among its users. The number of customers spending more than $1 million annually has doubled to over 1,000 in under two months as of April 2026, up from a dozen two years ago.

The IPO filings: both companies head for Nasdaq

On 1 June 2026, Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, targeting an October 2026 listing on the Nasdaq. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, which is expected to raise more than $60 billion. Wilson Sonsini, the firm that managed Google's 2004 IPO, is assisting on public-market readiness. Because the filing is confidential, the document is not yet publicly available. Anthropic said the filing "gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review."

OpenAI moved first, filing confidentially with the SEC on 22 May 2026, according to CNBC. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading that deal as well. However, separate reports indicate OpenAI is now leaning toward a 2027 IPO rather than a 2026 debut — a discrepancy in the reported filing dates (22 May and 8 June appear in different sources) that has not been officially clarified by the company.

The two companies' financial profiles could scarcely be more different heading into public markets. Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in revenue during Q1 2026 and is on track for $10.9 billion in Q2 — which, according to a source familiar with the matter cited by CNBC, would make it Anthropic's first profitable quarter. OpenAI, by contrast, reportedly loses $1.22 for every $1 it earns, with projected 2026 losses of approximately $14 billion despite $2 billion in monthly revenue.

Valuations and the fine print

Anthropic's Series H, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, values the company at $965 billion — narrowly ahead of OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from a March 2026 round. The $65 billion Series H is the largest private venture capital round in history, and Anthropic has now raised approximately $125 billion in total funding.

There is, however, a significant caveat worth flagging. Anthropic reports revenue from cloud resellers — including AWS, Google, and Microsoft — on a gross basis, counting total end-customer spend as revenue and booking partner payouts as expenses. This inflates its top-line figures relative to companies that report on a net basis. Investors and journalists have noted this distinction is material when comparing Anthropic's headline numbers to peers.

Compute costs are also substantial. Anthropic is spending approximately $19 billion on compute in 2026, with SpaceX agreements for GPU capacity running at $1.25 billion per month through May 2029. Gross margin currently stands at around 40%, with Anthropic targeting 77% by 2028 and overall profitability by that year.

Market share: Anthropic edges ahead of OpenAI in business spend

The revenue overtake is mirrored in market share data. According to Ramp's May 2026 AI Index, Anthropic edged past OpenAI in business AI spend for the first time — 34.4% versus 32.3%. Counterpoint Research placed Anthropic's global large language model revenue share at 31.4% in Q1 2026, narrowly ahead of OpenAI's 29%.

• Anthropic $47bn run-rate vs OpenAI $25bn annualised revenue (mid-2026)
• Anthropic targets October 2026 Nasdaq IPO; OpenAI may slip to 2027
• Claude Code: 54% AI coding market share, $8bn annualised revenue by May 2026
• Anthropic valuation: $965bn — narrowly ahead of OpenAI's $852bn

Both companies are burning through extraordinary sums building the infrastructure they believe will underpin the next decade of software. Whether public markets will tolerate those losses — or demand a faster path to profit — is the question both S-1 filings will have to answer.