OpenAI Assures Employees of Operational Health as July Annualized Recurring Revenue Surpasses Q2 Total

As OpenAI actively races to catch up with enterprise market competitor Anthropic and contends with the emergence of cheaper open-source alternatives, CNBC reported, citing informed sources, that OpenAI executives are working hard to reassure employees about the company's business health and discussing competition with Anthropic.

According to partial transcripts of a meeting reviewed by CNBC, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar stated during an internal employee meeting on Wednesday (29th) that the company's annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in July had surpassed the revenue scale of Q2, adding, "and Q2 was certainly not a weak quarter."

Friar and OpenAI Board Chair Bret Taylor highlighted that growth momentum is primarily driven by the GPT-4.6 series models, the new enterprise AI agent tool ChatGPT Work, and the steadily increasing adoption of the AI programming tool Codex.

OpenAI is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO), under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation. The company faces a rapidly changing competitive landscape, including from Anthropic and Google (GOOGL-US), as well as a wave of so-called "open-weight models" emerging from China, which are available at significantly lower costs than their U.S. counterparts.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 earlier this month, claiming the model has closed the gap with top-tier U.S. AI products and even outperformed OpenAI and Anthropic's most powerful systems in certain benchmark tests.

Anthropic's valuation has already surpassed OpenAI's earlier this year. In May, the company announced that its annualized revenue projection had exceeded $4.7 billion, thanks to the popularity of its Claude Code tool among developers—far exceeding its estimated full-year 2025 revenue of around $1 billion.

Meanwhile, according to a March report by The Information, OpenAI's recent annualized revenue has surpassed $2.5 billion.

OpenAI is accelerating efforts to attract new users, especially enterprise customers and developers, to generate the revenue needed to support its AI infrastructure plans. The company is currently negotiating a secured commitment of up to $250 billion with NVIDIA (NVDA-US) to help the latter lease a large AI data center in Ohio.

Taylor said during Wednesday’s employee meeting that Anthropic demonstrated strong momentum early this year and acknowledged that OpenAI must catch up in the programming market.

However, he expressed encouragement over Codex's growth, stating, "You see people who are deeply using Claude Code eventually facing very high bills and starting to look for alternatives."

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have secretly filed IPO applications with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June but have not disclosed any details regarding their上市 timelines.