Deirdre Bosa explains what OpenAI's (OPAI.PVT) third quarter numbers reveal about where the company stands in relation to Anthropic (ANTH.PVT).
I just got a hold of some new numbers from OpenAI. They suggest the story is starting to change. For the first time this year, OpenAI, it's growing at roughly the same pace as Anthropic quarter over quarter, and that is a big deal, especially because Anthropic is about to go public.
Let me explain a little more. For most of this year, it felt like Anthropic was just running away with this race. You can see this chart here, it's from its S1 prospectus. But really the narrative has been claude. It became the default for a lot of developers and plenty of non-developers too, myself included.
Claude Code took off, people were vibe coding, companies, they were building on Anthropic's models in a very big way, and really the numbers backed all of that up.
Anthropic passed OpenAI in reported revenue last spring. It was more than doubling its revenue every quarter and meanwhile, OpenAI was still growing, just nowhere near as fast.
You might remember in the second quarter, Anthropic grew 144%. OpenAI just 18%, and that is a pretty stark difference.
I'll be honest, when I started digging into these third quarter numbers, I expected more of the same or at least not this big of a jump. That's not what happened. OpenAI did $10 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up from about 6.7 billion. So that is nearly 50% growth, almost triple its growth rate from the quarter before.
Now take a look at what Anthropic did. $17 billion in the third quarter, that's 47% growth quarter over quarter.
So just think about what happened. OpenAI went from 18% growth to nearly 50. Anthropic went from 144% down to 47%. So for the first time this year, their quarterly growth rates basically neck and neck.
Now to be clear, Anthropic still reports a lot more revenue on that absolute basis and there are some differences in how these companies account for cloud sales. So the exact size of that lead, it's hard to pin down precisely, but the change in growth is what caught my attention.
Anthropic slowing down, probably inevitable at some point. You can't just double your revenue every three months forever even in AI, but what I expected least was OpenAI speeding up this much, this quickly.
The timing, of course, is fascinating because Anthropic, it's just about to ask public investors to buy into this growth story, and it is still an incredible one to be clear, but now for the first time in a while, OpenAI has a much stronger quarter to put up against it.
