OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar told employees Wednesday that annualized recurring revenue in July alone topped the entire second quarter, as the company defends an $852 billion valuation.
Key Points:
- OpenAI's CFO said July annualized recurring revenue exceeded the whole of the second quarter, without giving any dollar figure.
- Executives credited the GPT-5.6 model series, the ChatGPT Work enterprise agent and rising Codex adoption.
- The remarks land as Anthropic holds a $47 billion run rate and a larger valuation than OpenAI.
Friar Details OpenAI Revenue Momentum
Friar spoke at an internal all-hands meeting alongside board chair Bret Taylor, and the two used the session to reassure staff that the business remains healthy despite a crowded field. She added that the second quarter itself had been no slouch. Neither executive attached a dollar figure to July, to the second quarter, or to the company's current annualized run rate, and OpenAI does not report results publicly.
The two attributed that momentum to three products, namely the GPT-5.6 model series, a new enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and wider adoption of the coding tool Codex. Each of the three arrived or expanded this month.
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Anthropic And Kimi K3 Squeeze OpenAI
Anthropic has set the pace for much of 2026, and its strongest position happens to sit in the coding market that Taylor singled out for staff.
The rival disclosed in May that its revenue run rate had reached $47 billion, up from roughly $10 billion across all of 2025, with its Claude Code tool driving much of that jump. Its valuation overtook OpenAI's in the same week.
Taylor conceded the coding gap without much hedging. He said Anthropic had opened the year strongly, and that developers who leaned hard on Claude Code eventually ran up large bills and started shopping for alternatives.
China's Moonshot AI added to the squeeze this month with Kimi K3, a model the lab says beats the most capable American systems on some benchmarks. Cheaper open-weight releases from Chinese developers, along with competition from Google, now sit beside Anthropic on the list of threats to OpenAI's growth in the enterprise market. No absolute revenue figure surfaced from the meeting, which limits outside scrutiny.
OpenAI Spending And IPO Stakes
Spending explains why a single month of revenue carries this much weight. OpenAI is negotiating with Nvidia over a backstop worth up to $250 billion, money that would let it lease a 10-gigawatt data center campus in southern Ohio.
The July claim caps a year in which OpenAI has released selective milestones rather than full accounts of what it earns and spends. A March report placed annualized revenue above $25 billion, and the company has published no fresh figure in the four months since then.
OpenAI and Anthropic both filed confidentially for public listings in June, and neither has named a date for a debut.
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