Anthropic appears to have overtaken OpenAI on this key financial metric

By Christine Ji

Anthropic said its annualized revenue has grown to $30 billion, in a sign of its rapidly evolving financial fortunes

Anthropic's revenue run rate has hit $30 billion, a massive jump from the $9 billion that the company disclosed at the end of last year.

Anthropic's rapid ascent appears to be shaking up the artificial-intelligence leaderboard.

The company said in a press release Monday that its revenue run rate has exceeded $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The number of business customers spending over $1 million on an annualized basis has doubled from 500 in February to 1,000.

For comparison, OpenAI said last week that it's generating $2 billion a month, which "likely implies" that it's trailing Anthropic on a run-rate basis, according to Jefferies analyst Brent Thill.

To keep up with surging demand, Anthropic just entered into a new agreement with Google (GOOGL) (GOOG) and Broadcom (AVGO) to scale its AI infrastructure with roughly 3.5 gigawatts of TPU compute that is expected to come online starting in 2027. This is likely the first of many compute deals for Anthropic as the company scales up, Thill wrote in a Tuesday note.

Read: Broadcom's stock is rising. Here's why its new Google and Anthropic deals are so significant.

Anthropic utilizes multiple hardware providers, including Google TPUs, Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs and Amazon.com's (AMZN) Trainium. Amazon is Anthropic's primary cloud provider. Further cloud deals will likely be bullish for Google, Amazon "and to a lesser extent Microsoft (MSFT)," Thill wrote.

Even as Anthropic pulls ahead on revenue, OpenAI is still very much a leading player in the AI competition, Thill added, pointing out that OpenAI has over 900 million weekly active users and significant amounts of capital and capacity. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round last week for an $852 billion post-money valuation.

Additionally, OpenAI has been much more opportunistic about securing capacity. The company embarked on a deal-making spree last year, racking up $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments. However, OpenAI has reportedly clarified its commitments since then, telling investors in February that it plans to spend $600 billion by 2030.

Representatives from OpenAI did not immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

See more: Anthropic's meteoric rise shocked the market - but the AI crown remains up for grabs

Anthropic's momentum could add more fuel to the selloff plaguing the software sector as investors worry about AI spending "crowding out" software budgets, Thill wrote. In just three months, Anthropic added more than a third of the net new annualized revenue that Jefferies's software universe - excluding Microsoft - produced in all of 2025.

Recent Anthropic launches such as Claude Cowork have contributed to depressed software sentiment. Shares of the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund IGV have fallen 25% year to date on fears that AI will displace traditional software businesses.

"This continued acceleration will drive the narrative that Anthropic & OpenAI are consuming all IT budgets," Thill wrote, especially considering that 77% of Jefferies's software coverage is expected to show decelerating revenue growth in 2026.

-Christine Ji

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04-07-26 1154ET