Scoop: OpenAI's annual recurring revenue nears $70B
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OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is nearing $70 billion, as enterprise sales more than doubled since July, sources familiar with the financials tell Axios.
Why it matters: Rival Anthropic has owned enterprise AI adoption, but OpenAI has been catching up.
By the numbers: OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate has grown more than 70% since the beginning of the third quarter, reaching almost $70 billion.
- Its business-to-business revenue has grown more than 100% over the same period.
- On the consumer side, OpenAI added more revenue during the third quarter than it added during all of 2025.
The big picture: The growth comes as OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for IPOs, which would give investors the clearest look yet at both the revenue opportunity and extraordinary spending driving their growth.
- Anthropic's revenue grew twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion in 2025, according to an IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.
- But its growth has skyrocketed since then, hitting an annualized total of about $65 billion in July and continuing to surge, according to figures in The New York Times and elsewhere.
- Anthropic's prospectus also shows it has $518 billion in future cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations, according to Reuters.
The intrigue: As part of that prospectus, Anthropic warned investors that its technology could pose "existential risk" to humanity.
- This comes after Axios reported top AI labs are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their technology took steps reasonable researchers would describe as problematic.
Reality check: Axios could not immediately learn details about OpenAI's expenses, which is important context in relation to their business growth.
