OpenAI is recovering from the downturn earlier this year. Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, reported that driven by strong demand for the recent AI model, the company's quarterly revenue exceeded $10 billion for the first time.
If true, this would mean that its revenue has increased by nearly 50% compared to the $6.7 billion reported in the second quarter. This also marks a significant acceleration in its revenue growth rate; previously, it was said that the growth rate between the first and second quarters of this year was around 18%.
The report also stated that the profitability of OpenAI seems to have improved as well, with its adjusted operating margin narrowing from -150% in the second quarter to -109% in the third quarter.
OpenAI is one of the first companies to commercialize the AI model, so it is not difficult for them to continue to expand their revenue. Achieving a 18% increase on a quarterly revenue base of 5.7 billion dollars is quite impressive, especially when compared to most software companies.
However, during this period, the growth momentum of OpenAI was overshadowed by its main competitor, Anthropic. The latter holds a leading position in the competition for the AI model market and recently announced revenue of $17 billion for the third quarter. OpenAI's broader product lineup helped it attract a large user base early on and gain popularity; it claims to have over 1 billion users, but it is reasonable to assume that the majority of these are free users or those subscribed to the cheapest packages.
Nevertheless, OpenAI still lags behind Anthropic in terms of serving corporate customers; at least in terms of revenue growth, the latter is already ahead in this market.
OpenAI has recently benefited from a variety of factors, including tighter pricing, discounts, model improvements, and a greater focus on creating products for businesses as well as AI agents that can help users complete tasks.
Bloomberg reports that OpenAI's current annualized revenue run rate has reached $50 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic stated yesterday that as of the end of October, its annualized revenue run rate increased by $10 billion in one month to reach $81 billion. Anthropic is seeking a valuation of $1.4 trillion in the upcoming IPO.
(Note: OpenAI and Anthropic use different methods to calculate annualized revenue. Anthropic includes sales revenue generated through cloud partners, while OpenAI only reports the portion of sales revenue generated through partners.)
Of course, these numbers are not small, but these companies are also competing with models from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. At the same time, they also have to face a large number of cheaper yet still powerful open-source AI laboratory models, especially those from China.
