OpenAI's management sent a strong signal of confidence to employees amid intensifying industry competition.

According to reports, during an internal meeting with staff on Wednesday, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar and Board Chair Bret Taylor highlighted OpenAI's revenue growth and addressed competition with Anthropic. Friar stated that OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue (ARR) for July has already exceeded the company's total revenue for the entire second quarter. "The second quarter didn't disappoint either," Friar noted during the meeting.

Friar and Taylor attributed the growth to the release of the GPT-5.6 series models, the launch of the new enterprise-grade agent ChatGPT Work, and the rising usage of the AI coding tool Codex.

As OpenAI races toward a major IPO, it still needs to demonstrate the fundamental support for its $852 billion valuation. The company is currently caught in a multi-front competitive landscape, facing direct challenges from rivals like Anthropic and Google, while a wave of low-cost open-source models continues to erode its market share. OpenAI is actively attracting new users, particularly enterprises and developers, to generate the revenue needed to support its infrastructure spending plans, which currently rely heavily on external capital. In February, OpenAI told investors it plans to achieve a computing expenditure target of approximately $600 billion by 2030.

Media reports earlier this week indicated that OpenAI is in discussions with Nvidia for up to $250 billion in financial backing to help lease a large new AI data center in Ohio.

The rapid rise of competitors has also raised market questions about the sustainability of OpenAI's business growth. Anthropic said in May that its annualized revenue had surpassed $47 billion, a significant jump from its projected full-year 2025 revenue of about $10 billion, driven largely by the popularity of its Claude Code tool among developers. After completing its latest funding round in May, Anthropic's valuation reached $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI to claim the top spot among global AI startups.

According to a March media report, OpenAI's annualized revenue recently surpassed $25 billion. Taylor told employees on Wednesday that Anthropic has had a strong start to the year, acknowledging that OpenAI needs to catch up in the code sector. However, he expressed encouragement over Codex's growth. "Some people who have been heavy users of Claude Code are finding their bills getting very expensive and are starting to look for alternatives," Taylor said during the meeting.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially submitted IPO filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June. Neither company has disclosed a specific timeline for going public.