OpenAI has informed its investors that second-quarter revenue grew 18% from the first quarter, yet its losses widened further. Some shareholders are disappointed with the results, having anticipated greater progress from the startup in closing the gap with competitor Anthropic.
According to sources familiar with the matter, OpenAI's revenue rose from $57 billion in the first quarter to $67 billion in the three months ending in June. Meanwhile, the company's operating margin sank deeper into losses. In the lead-up to the highly anticipated initial public offering, this pushes the goal of profitability even further out of reach.
During the same period, Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $116 billion, marking the first time its sales have surpassed those of its older rival OpenAI. The company also achieved a slight operating profit. The diverging fortunes of the two firms highlight a dramatic shift in the competitive landscape of the artificial intelligence sector since the start of this year.
The slowdown in ChatGPT growth, combined with the blockbuster success of Anthropic's coding tool Claude Code, has put OpenAI on the back foot, forcing the company to adjust its strategy and restructure its management team. Last week, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, Dennis Dreyer, departed after less than a year in the role. This followed a series of executive exits, including former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, once viewed as a potential successor to chief executive Sam Altman.
Insiders say OpenAI has told investors that growth has picked up since the launch of a range of new models in July. For most startups, nearly $70 billion in quarterly revenue would be an impressive achievement, but expectations for OpenAI are considerably higher. The company has painted an extremely ambitious growth trajectory for investors and signed massive computing capacity agreements, predicated on the assumption that it will soon generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue.
The performance of tech giants such as Nvidia and Oracle also hinges on OpenAI's ability to deliver on its commitments to them. OpenAI's quarter-over-quarter growth rate trails Palantir during the same period, and also lags behind other high-growth AI companies like CoreWeave and Micron Technology. OpenAI recently launched a "super app" that integrates the coding tool Codex, ChatGPT, and a web browser; the company says user numbers for the new product are climbing rapidly.
In recent months, co-founder and president Greg Brockman has taken a more hands-on role in leading product and business divisions, in an effort to reignite growth. Including stock-based compensation expenses, OpenAI's operating loss widened from $93 billion in the first quarter to $123 billion in the second quarter, with the increase in losses outpacing revenue growth. By comparison, Anthropic barely achieved adjusted profitability and has told investors it is making progress in the efficiency of its computing resource usage.
Anthropic is not yet publicly listed, and the exact methodology for calculating its adjusted profit remains unclear. However, in previous communications with investors, the company has excluded stock-based compensation expenses from this metric. OpenAI subsidizes hundreds of millions of users who access ChatGPT for free; at the same time, as enterprise customers have grown more cautious about AI spending and shifted more tasks to lower-cost AI systems, OpenAI has cut prices on two of its latest models.
Anthropic also needs to reassure investors, amid growing concerns about the threat Chinese models pose to American AI labs. After OpenAI's autonomous agents bypassed security isolation measures in a test environment and breached other companies, the company has recently paused development of some new models and stepped up monitoring of its AI systems.
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