OpenAI’s quarterly revenue reportedly crosses $10B for the first time

OpenAI is bouncing back from the doldrums it experienced earlier this year. The company’s quarterly revenue crossed $10 billion for the first time, thanks to strong demand for its recent AI models, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources.

If true, that would represent an almost 50% jump from the $6.7 billion in sales the company reportedly recorded in the second quarter. That would also mark a sizable increase in its revenue growth rate, which was previously said to be about 18% between the first and second quarters of the year.

OpenAI’s profitability picture also appears to have improved, with its adjusted operating margin narrowing from -150% in the second quarter to -109% in the third quarter, the report said.

OpenAI, one of the first to commercialize AI models, wasn’t exactly struggling to continue growing its top-line expansion — 18% growth on top of $5.7 billion in quarterly revenue is massive by any measure, especially compared to most software businesses.

But it was seeing those gains be trumped by its archrival Anthropic, which has taken the lead in capturing the enterprise market for AI models and recently reported Q3 revenue of $17 billion. OpenAI’s broader focus helped it attract a large user base and gain popularity early on, and it says it has over a billion users, but it’s reasonable to assume most of those are free users or subscribers to its cheapest plans.

Still, the company lagged Anthropic in catering to enterprises, a market where the Claude-maker has pulled ahead, at least in terms of revenue growth.

OpenAI has recently benefited from a combination of tighter pricing, discounts, improving models, and a greater focus on building more enterprise-focused products and AI agents that can help people complete tasks.

OpenAI has now reached an annual revenue run rate of $50 billion, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Anthropic, which is seeking a $1.4 trillion valuation in an IPO likely to happen soon, said yesterday that its annual revenue run rate had increased by $10 billion within a month to $81 billion as of the end of October.

(Note that OpenAI and Anthropic calculate their annualized revenue differently: Anthropic counts sales made by its cloud partners, while OpenAI only reports its share of some sales through its partners.)

None of those figures are small, of course, but the companies are also competing with models from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as well as a plethora of cheaper but still highly capable models from open-source AI labs, especially those from China.