OpenAI is working to reassure employees about its business stability as it competes with rival Anthropic in the enterprise market and faces new pressures from cheaper open-source alternatives. The company's Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, and Board Chair, Bret Taylor, highlighted revenue growth and addressed the competitive landscape during an internal meeting with staff on Wednesday.
During the session, Friar disclosed that OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue for July had already exceeded the total for the entire second quarter. Meeting transcripts show Friar stating, "The second quarter itself performed well too." Friar and Taylor attributed this momentum to the launch of the GPT-5.6 series of models, the new enterprise-focused intelligent agent ChatGPT Work, and the increasing usage of the AI coding tool Codex.
OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation as it prepares for what could be a massive initial public offering (IPO). The competitive landscape continues to shift, with rivals including Anthropic, Google, and several open-source models from China that offer significantly lower usage costs. To address these challenges, OpenAI is aggressively expanding its user base, focusing on enterprise clients and developers to generate sufficient revenue to support its infrastructure investment plans, which are funded by external capital.
In February of this year, OpenAI informed investors of plans to invest approximately $600 billion cumulatively in computing power by 2030. The company is currently in negotiations with Nvidia for a funding package of up to $250 billion to support its plans to lease a massive new artificial intelligence data center in Ohio.
These staggering figures, combined with the rapid rise of Anthropic—whose valuation surpassed OpenAI's earlier this year—have raised questions about the sustainability of OpenAI's business growth. In May, Anthropic reported that its annualized revenue had exceeded $47 billion, a significant jump from its projected full-year 2025 revenue of approximately $10 billion, driven primarily by the popularity of its Claude coding tool among developers.
In March of this year, reports indicated that OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue had recently surpassed $250 billion. During Wednesday's meeting, OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor acknowledged that Anthropic has had a strong start to the year and admitted that OpenAI needs to catch up in the coding market. However, he expressed encouragement over Codex's growth. "You see some people who have deeply used Claude Code, and their bills become very expensive, so they start looking for alternatives," Taylor stated during the meeting.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially filed for IPOs with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June. Neither company has provided further details on the timeline for their planned public offerings.