According to Bloomberg, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, CFO Sarah Friar, and product lead Thibault Sottiaux took part in the closed call. The Wall Street Journal reports that growth accelerated after a weak first half of the year: in the second quarter, OpenAI revenue rose by only 18% to $6.7 billion.
Friar attributed the jump to new AI models and growth in the enterprise segment. According to her, business sales doubled over the quarter, and enterprise customers now bring the company as much revenue as regular users.
The number of ChatGPT subscribers approached 100 million, which corresponds to 8.5% of roughly 1.2 billion people who use the service at least once a week. OpenAI’s adjusted operating loss rose from $10.1 billion to $10.9 billion, while operating margin improved from –150% to –109%. This calculation does not include stock-based compensation for employees; a WSJ source estimated it at another $2.6 billion in the third quarter.
Anthropic also reported growth: the company’s quarterly revenue reached nearly $17 billion, which is 47% higher than in the second quarter and 144% higher than the previous quarter. At the same time, Anthropic returned to an operating loss: it amounted to $567 million versus a profit of $974 million in the second quarter. According to Axios, on a “clean” basis Anthropic’s revenue would have fallen by only 6–10%, but it would still have been higher by about $20 billion on an annualized basis.
The two companies’ figures cannot be compared directly. Anthropic includes stock-based compensation in its loss and counts the full amount of sales through Amazon and Google cloud services in revenue, even though it later gives part of the money to partners; OpenAI, when selling through Microsoft, records only its own share.
OpenAI recently closed the first part of a new investment round and received about $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation; the total amount raised could grow to $20 billion. Anthropic published an updated IPO prospectus with a range of $70–78 per share, and the Financial Times пишет that lead banks are discussing a higher price and a valuation of up to $1.5 trillion and above, while the total share sale could exceed $100 billion.
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