Anthropic pulls ahead of OpenAI as revenue race heats up

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company backed by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, has crossed $30 billion in annualized revenue, outpacing OpenAI for the first time, according to Jefferies analysts.

The surge comes after Anthropic added roughly $21 billion in net new annualized revenue in just three months, more than one-third of the $58 billion added by Jefferies' entire public software coverage (excluding Microsoft) in all of 2025.

Analysts note that this rapid growth is likely to stoke concerns that Anthropic and OpenAI could dominate corporate IT budgets.

Anthropic's growth has been fueled in part by a recent agreement with Google and Broadcom to supply around 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation TPU-based AI compute capacity, expected to come online in 2027. Jefferies highlighted that similar capacity deals may follow, benefiting cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

"Anthropic's continued acceleration should help support future revenue and order growth for its cloud partners," analysts wrote, citing Google's reported 158% year-over-year increase in remaining performance obligations in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Despite Anthropic pulling ahead in revenue, analysts caution that OpenAI remains a formidable competitor. OpenAI has raised significantly more capital, secured substantial compute capacity, and maintains a large and engaged user base, including more than 900 million weekly active users. Its free-tier users provide a substantial data advantage, with the potential to drive monetization through advertising and other services.

"As demand continues to surge, we believe Anthropic will need to keep scaling compute commitments, while carefully balancing capacity between training future frontier models and serving inference demand today, especially given scaling laws remain very much intact," analysts wrote.

Jefferies concluded that while Anthropic may currently lead in revenue, both companies are likely to continue shaping AI spending across enterprise IT budgets, with further growth expected as demand for AI compute capacity continues to accelerate.