In the same week Anthropic disclosed a $30 billion annualized revenue run rate, new reports confirmed that OpenAI has surpassed $25 billion in annualized revenue and is taking early steps toward a public listing as soon as late 2026. The two headline numbers from these disclosures — $25 billion and $30 billion — deserve more attention than they are getting, because they quietly rewrite the story everyone tells about the AI business.
For most of 2024 and 2025, the dominant narrative was "AI companies are burning cash on compute and nobody knows if the revenue model works." That narrative is now outdated. OpenAI is running at roughly the revenue scale of Salesforce in 2015, and Anthropic is running at the revenue scale of Salesforce in 2018. Both companies got there in less than five years from founding. That is one of the fastest revenue ramps in software history.
The 5-Second Version
- OpenAI's annualized revenue has crossed $25 billion as of April 2026, up from roughly $11B in mid-2025.
- OpenAI is reportedly taking early steps toward an IPO as soon as late 2026 — banker conversations, governance cleanup, audit prep.
- Anthropic's revenue is at $30 billion annualized, exceeding OpenAI's for the first time.
- OpenAI's last private valuation was around $500 billion. A 2026 IPO in the $300B-$600B range would be one of the largest tech IPOs in history.
- The AI business is now real and profitable at scale — not a money-losing experiment that depends on VC subsidy.
The Revenue Numbers, In Context
The easiest way to feel how big $25 billion actually is: compare OpenAI's current revenue to major public software companies at various points in their history.
OpenAI is 10 years old (founded December 2015). It took Salesforce nearly two decades and Oracle nearly three decades to reach the same revenue. That is the compression of this cycle in concrete numbers.
The revenue mix is roughly: ChatGPT subscriptions (Plus at $20/mo, Team at $30/user/mo, Enterprise custom) represent the majority — somewhere north of $16-$18 billion of the $25B. The API business contributes another $5-$7 billion. Enterprise deployment deals with large customers like Morgan Stanley, Klarna, and Moderna contribute the rest. The subscription mix is the story: OpenAI is closer to a consumer SaaS company with an enterprise arm than a pure infrastructure play.
Anthropic Is Now Bigger Than OpenAI on Revenue
This is the part that is going to keep showing up in business coverage over the next several months. For most of the past three years, OpenAI has been ahead of Anthropic on basically every metric — users, revenue, mindshare, valuation. As of April 2026, Anthropic's disclosed run rate is $30 billion versus OpenAI's $25 billion. That is the first time Anthropic has led on revenue.
Two important caveats. First: the comparison is noisy. Anthropic and OpenAI recognize revenue differently, and Anthropic's $30B figure may weight recently-signed enterprise contracts more heavily than OpenAI's reporting. Second: the order is likely to flip back and forth as both companies grow and disclose new numbers throughout 2026.
But the story is that Anthropic has caught up, and the gap that existed in 2023 (when Anthropic was 1/10th of OpenAI's size) is now gone. That reflects three things: Claude has eaten the developer-and-engineer market for AI coding; Anthropic's enterprise deals with Amazon, Google, and others have ramped aggressively; and OpenAI has been less focused on enterprise relative to consumer growth.
What an OpenAI IPO Actually Looks Like
The reports about OpenAI "taking early steps" toward an IPO are worth reading carefully. Early steps in banker language specifically means things like hiring underwriters, cleaning up governance and cap table, doing dry-run audit work, and starting the long process of turning a private company into a public-company-ready entity. None of that locks OpenAI into a 2026 IPO. But it does strongly suggest 2026 or 2027 is on the table.
An OpenAI IPO is complicated by a few factors that don't affect most public listings:
The Microsoft Partnership Structure
OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft is not a normal investment — Microsoft gets a share of OpenAI's profits up to a cap, plus preferred access to model releases, plus revenue share from Azure. Unwinding or disclosing this structure cleanly for public markets is legally intricate. Expect this to be the slowest-moving piece of IPO prep.
The Nonprofit-Holds-Company Structure
OpenAI Inc (the nonprofit) still technically controls OpenAI LP (the capped-profit subsidiary). Public markets require clean corporate governance and clear voting rights. OpenAI has been quietly restructuring toward a simpler public-company structure since late 2024; this is likely part of the "early steps" being reported.
Profitability Question
OpenAI is growing fast and burning fast. Public markets in 2026 are more skeptical of "growth at any cost" than they were in 2021. OpenAI likely needs to show a credible path to operating profitability, or at least unit economics that work, before they can list. That may push the actual IPO into 2027 even if prep starts now.
Valuation Expectations
OpenAI's last private round was at ~$500B. Public markets typically apply a discount to private valuations at IPO. A $300-400B listing is more plausible than $500B+, unless AI premium multiples stay extreme through 2026. Expect a range of $300B to $600B depending on market sentiment the week of listing.
What This Means for Everyone Who Is Not OpenAI
Three takeaways if you are a builder, an operator, or a working professional trying to figure out how to position yourself.
The AI business is real. For the past two years, the most common pushback on AI has been "nobody is actually making money, this is all VC subsidy." That argument is now over. Two companies are doing $25B and $30B in revenue. This is a real industry, not a hype cycle. Anyone who was waiting for AI to "prove itself" before investing learning time should stop waiting.
The best AI skills are sticky. When an industry is growing at this speed, people who have hands-on experience with the tools get paid significant premiums. The gap between "I use ChatGPT sometimes" and "I can design, ship, and debug an AI-integrated workflow" is now worth $20K-$60K per year in salary across most professional roles. That gap is going to persist for several more years.
The infrastructure war is over. OpenAI and Anthropic have won. Google is a close third. Everyone else — Meta, Mistral, xAI, various Chinese labs — is now in a second tier competing for capabilities, specific niches, or cost advantages. If you are building AI products, you are building on top of four or five foundation models for the rest of 2026, and the names don't change.
The Bottom Line
OpenAI at $25B and Anthropic at $30B is the headline. The subtext is that working on top of these models is now the most lucrative professional skill in software, and the demand for people who can build AI-integrated products isn't slowing down. Every AI news story this week, whether it was about compute, cheap APIs, or video generation, is another data point that the industry is concentrating, not collapsing. Build accordingly.
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