TL;DR: OpenAI’s quarterly revenue reportedly crossed $10 billion for the first time last quarter, according to a new Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources, up almost 50% from the $6.7 billion the company logged in the second quarter. The jump looks like a real recovery after a rough stretch earlier this year, but OpenAI is still losing ground to Anthropic, which says its own annualized run rate just climbed to $81 billion.
Bloomberg’s sources say OpenAI pulled in just over $10 billion in revenue during the third quarter, and if that number holds up, it’s the first time the company has crossed that line in a single three month stretch. OpenAI hasn’t confirmed the figure itself, and the report leans on people familiar with the company’s finances rather than an official statement, so treat the exact dollar amount as a strong rumor rather than a locked number.
The acceleration is the real story
What makes this interesting isn’t just the size of the number, it’s how fast it moved. The Wall Street Journal previously reported OpenAI brought in $6.7 billion in the second quarter, itself an 18% jump from the quarter before that. Going from 18% growth to something close to 50% growth in a single quarter is a big swing, and it lines up with a stretch where OpenAI shipped several model updates, cut pricing in places, and leaned harder into enterprise sales and AI agents that can actually finish tasks instead of just answering questions.
Part of that enterprise push showed up just hours before this report, when OpenAI put ChatGPT Enterprise on the AWS Marketplace, letting companies buy it through Amazon billing they already have set up. That’s a small move on its own, but it’s exactly the kind of friction removal that turns interested IT departments into paying accounts, and it fits the pattern Bloomberg describes of OpenAI chasing enterprise revenue harder than it used to.
The same Bloomberg report says OpenAI’s adjusted operating margin improved too, narrowing from negative 150% in the second quarter to negative 109% in the third. That’s still deeply unprofitable in absolute terms, this is a company burning more than it brings in even after adjustments, but the direction matters. A company tightening its margin while growing revenue at an accelerating rate is in a very different spot than one just burning cash to chase growth with no end in sight.
Anthropic is still the one setting the pace
Here’s the part OpenAI probably doesn’t love seeing printed next to its own numbers. Anthropic reported $17 billion in third-quarter revenue, well clear of OpenAI’s roughly $10 billion, and said just a day before this report that its annualized run rate jumped by $10 billion in a single month to hit $81 billion by the end of October. Bloomberg pegs OpenAI’s own run rate at around $50 billion, which would make Anthropic’s lead substantial rather than marginal.
Anthropic built that advantage largely on enterprise contracts and coding tools, the kind of high-margin, sticky business that doesn’t depend on winning the consumer chatbot wars. OpenAI has the much bigger audience, it says it has crossed a billion users, but most of those are on free or cheap plans rather than the enterprise seats that actually move revenue. That gap in business model is a big part of why Anthropic, despite being younger and smaller by headcount, has pulled ahead on the metric that matters most to investors watching its run-up to a reported $1.25 trillion valuation and a planned IPO.
The run-rate math doesn’t quite line up, and that’s worth knowing
If you try to check these numbers against each other, they won’t cleanly fit. A single quarter of $10 billion in revenue, if it repeated every quarter, would annualize to about $40 billion, not the $50 billion run rate Bloomberg attributes to OpenAI. Part of that gap likely comes down to how each company calculates the figure. Anthropic reportedly counts revenue booked through its cloud partners in its run rate, while OpenAI only counts its own share of some partner-driven sales. That’s not a minor technicality. It means two headline numbers that look like they’re measuring the same thing are actually built on different accounting choices, and comparing them directly without that caveat is misleading.
That accounting gap matters beyond bragging rights. It’s one reason Wall Street is still nervous about AI financing demand even as both companies post eye-catching growth. Investors pouring money into compute buildouts want revenue numbers they can actually compare side by side, and right now the two biggest AI labs in the world aren’t reporting on the same basis.
Competition isn’t getting any easier
None of this is happening in a vacuum. OpenAI and Anthropic are both fighting for enterprise budgets against Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, all of which have their own frontier models and, in most cases, far deeper pockets to subsidize pricing while they catch up. Add in increasingly capable open-source models out of Chinese labs, which undercut pricing on anything short of cutting-edge reasoning work, and the pressure on margins doesn’t go away just because one quarter looked good.
What to watch next
The real test of this report will be whether OpenAI starts talking about its own numbers instead of letting leaked figures do the talking. Anthropic has been comparatively open about its revenue trajectory heading into its IPO, which gives analysts something concrete to model against. If OpenAI keeps relying on anonymously sourced reports every quarter while its chief rival files actual prospectus numbers with regulators, the contrast alone will shape how investors price both companies, regardless of who’s growing faster in any single three month window. Watch for OpenAI’s own fourth-quarter numbers, and whether the margin improvement from this quarter holds or was a one-time effect of cost cutting rather than a durable shift in the business.
The bottom line
A reported 50% jump in quarterly revenue is a genuinely strong number, and it’s a real signal that OpenAI’s enterprise push and pricing changes are working better than they were earlier this year. But strong growth and winning aren’t the same thing. Anthropic is growing faster, from a smaller base, with a cleaner enterprise story, and it’s doing it while heading into an IPO that will put both companies’ numbers under far more scrutiny than an anonymously sourced Bloomberg report ever will. The company that figures out how to turn all of this user and enterprise growth into an actual profit first is the one that wins the decade, not the one with the bigger quarterly headline.
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