OpenAI-Anthropic enterprise rivalry heats up
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OpenAI is mobilizing consulting partners and touting its compute edge to claw back enterprise customers from Anthropic, as both labs barrel toward potential IPOs.
Why it matters: The outcome of this fight could determine which company hits the public markets with momentum, and which has to explain to investors why it's losing ground.
Driving the news: OpenAI is working to take market share from Anthropic's enterprise business.
- The AI lab is engaging several consulting partners to help enterprises deploy and scale Codex, OpenAI's coding tool.
- Partners will get early access to AI tools in hopes that they can help enterprises "rethink their business processes in the age of AI in a different way," chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told Axios.
Zoom out: It's part of OpenAI's broader shift toward enterprise revenue, after Claude Code's mass adoption led to businesses spending more money with Anthropic than OpenAI, per Ramp.
- Dresser told OpenAI employees in a memo last week that "the market is as competitive as I have ever seen it."
Between the lines: OpenAI and Anthropic are competing on everything from compute to enterprise adoption to model quality as both labs race toward IPOs that could come as soon as this fall.
- "Everyone's operating in winner-take-all mode" and that's happening at "every layer of the tech stack," says Anuj Kapur, CEO of AI software delivery platform CloudBees.
- Investor demand appears stronger for Anthropic than OpenAI in secondary markets, according to multiple reports.
If OpenAI doesn't catch up on revenue soon, Anthropic could "take a lead here that, let's say, over the next one or two years, could be insurmountable," David Sacks, tech investor and White House adviser, said on the "All-In" podcast.
- Growth compounds in the AI world: Models could get smarter over time due to more volume usage, for example.
- More paying customers could mean more revenue, which could be used to buy more compute.
Yes, but: OpenAI says it's ahead of Anthropic on compute capacity, which it highlighted in a recent investor letter reviewed by Axios.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has cautioned that aggressively scaling compute is risky given its high costs and uncertain demand, even as the company announced on Monday an expanded Amazon partnership to secure up to 5 gigawatts of additional compute.
- An OpenAI investor tells Axios that greater compute capacity is OpenAI's key advantage, as it can fuel more experimentation and keep Sam Altman's firm ahead on model performance.
The bottom line: OpenAI is spending to grow users, Anthropic is spending to protect margins, and both are battling toward the biggest IPOs in history.
