OpenAI’s Losses Widen as Anthropic Pulls Ahead on Revenue
3 min readOpenAI told investors it booked $6.7 billion in revenue in the three months ending in June, up 18% from $5.7 billion in the first quarter. Over the same stretch its operating loss widened to $12.3 billion, up from $9.3 billion. Anthropic, whose figures landed a day earlier, reported $11.6 billion in second quarter revenue and its first operating profit.
How the Lead Changed Hands
A year ago the ranking looked settled. OpenAI had first mover advantage, the most recognized consumer brand in the category, and ChatGPT growth nobody else could match. Anthropic was the smaller safety focused lab with a strong developer following and a fraction of the mindshare.
That picture inverted over 2026. ChatGPT growth flattened while Anthropic’s coding tool Claude Code turned into a real enterprise habit. Two caveats belong here. The OpenAI numbers, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and picked up by SiliconANGLE, come from people familiar with the company’s finances rather than an audited filing. Anthropic is private and has not explained how it calculates that operating profit.
Why the Loss Number Is the Real Story
Six and a half billion dollars a quarter would be a triumph almost anywhere else. OpenAI is not a normal company. It has raised roughly $180 billion and committed that money to data centers and multi year cloud contracts that only work if revenue eventually reaches the hundreds of billions annually. Losses growing faster than revenue is the wrong shape for that plan.
The pressure arrives from several directions at once. OpenAI subsidizes hundreds of millions of free ChatGPT users. It cut prices on two recent models to win back cost conscious enterprise buyers. And a growing share of enterprise tokens now flows to cheap open weight models, many of them Chinese. Executive churn has followed: chief revenue officer Denise Dresser left after less than a year, following chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo.
What to Watch Next
An OpenAI public offering is widely expected later this year, which would push audited numbers into the open for the first time. Until then these reported figures are the best signal available, and they arrive at an awkward moment. Nvidia, Oracle and every other company whose share price has been lifted by OpenAI’s spending commitments have a direct stake in whether that revenue curve steepens.
OpenAI has told investors privately that growth accelerated after its July model launches. It has not yet shown the numbers.