According to Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, OpenAI's third-quarter revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, up nearly 50% from $6.7 billion in the second quarter, signaling that the company is recovering from a growth slowdown earlier this year. Strong market demand and recent AI model launches are seen as the main factors driving the revenue rebound. Meanwhile, its adjusted operating margin narrowed from -150% in the second quarter to -109% in the third quarter, indicating improved profitability.
Earlier, OpenAI's revenue growth rates in the first and second quarters were both reportedly around 18%. Although the company has more than 1 billion users, a significant portion of them may be free users or low-cost subscribers, and its enterprise market performance still trails rival Anthropic. Anthropic recently reported third-quarter revenue of $17 billion and said its annual revenue had risen to $81 billion as of the end of October, an increase of $10 billion in a single month. Anthropic is currently seeking a valuation of about $1.4 trillion in an IPO.
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI's annual revenue has reached $50 billion. Recently, the company has driven business growth by tightening its pricing strategy, adjusting discounts, improving its models, and increasing investment in enterprise products and AI agents. However, the two companies use different methods to calculate annual revenue: Anthropic includes sales from cloud partners, while OpenAI only counts the portion of revenue it receives through partners.
As Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Chinese open-source AI labs continue to intensify competition, OpenAI and Anthropic not only need to scale up commercialization but also face multiple challenges, including compute costs, enterprise market share, and model pricing.
