Epoch AI: Anthropic revenue closing in on OpenAI's

Epoch AI published an analysis comparing revenue growth at Anthropic and OpenAI, estimating that Anthropic’s annualised revenue had been growing roughly tenfold a year since it first passed $1 billion, against about 3.4-fold a year for OpenAI over the comparable period. Extrapolating those trend lines, Epoch put a possible revenue crossover — the point at which Anthropic’s annualised revenue would overtake OpenAI’s — around mid-2026, at roughly $43 billion in annualised revenue for each company.

Epoch qualified its own extrapolation heavily. It noted Anthropic’s growth appeared to have already slowed, to something closer to sevenfold a year since mid-2025, and that both companies had separately signalled lower growth expectations going forward: OpenAI’s internal projections implied roughly 2.2x growth for 2026, and Anthropic’s implied 4x or less. Applying those more conservative, company-supplied figures instead of the historical trend pushed any crossover out into 2026 or 2027 rather than a fixed mid-year date, and the analysis stressed the difficulty of comparing annualised run-rate figures that are not independently audited and that both companies disclose selectively.

The analysis captured, without resolving, a live argument in industry commentary about how much of OpenAI’s much larger user base and cash position was translating into a durable revenue lead over a rival whose commercial strategy leaned harder toward enterprise and coding customers, and whose growth rate — even after conceding it would decelerate — remained the faster of the two by every projection Epoch considered.