{"id":42315,"date":"2026-05-18T09:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/42315\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T09:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:10:15","slug":"anthropic-openai-dominate-89-of-ai-app-revenue-musks-xai-misses-top-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/42315\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic, OpenAI Dominate 89% of AI App Revenue; Musk’s xAI Misses Top 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AnthropicAnthropic logo. Reuters-Yonhap\"OpenAIOpenAI logo. Reuters-Yonhap<\/p>\n

Anthropic and OpenAI together account for nearly 90% of the paid artificial intelligence (AI) app market, according to a new survey. While more than 30 major private startups operate paid AI services, the bulk of revenue is monopolized by the two leaders.<\/p>\n

The Information reported on Monday that 34 major private startups selling AI app services or model access generated combined annualized revenue of $80 billion (about 120 trillion won) as of this month. The figure represents a 112% increase from six months earlier and excludes publicly listed companies such as Google and Microsoft (MS).<\/p>\n

Anthropic and OpenAI accounted for 89% of that total. Compared with early 2023, when the two companies began full-fledged services, their combined share has jumped 36.8 percentage points in just over three years. The remaining 32 companies share only 11% of the pie.<\/p>\n

By company, annualized revenue stood at $55 billion for OpenAI, $15 billion for Anthropic, $2.7 billion for Cursor, and $500 million each for Cognition and ElevenLabs. xAI, led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, failed to break into the top five.<\/p>\n

However, these figures include amounts that Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud generated by reselling the two companies’ models, meaning actual revenue retained may be somewhat lower. In OpenAI’s case, contractual terms requiring it to share about 20% of revenue with Microsoft through 2030 are another variable. Still, the industry views that other startups have similar partnership structures, so the actual rankings are not significantly affected.<\/p>\n

Two-Horse Race Cemented by VC’s ‘Dual Bets’<\/p>\n

A concentration of capital in the investment market has further solidified the two-horse race. OpenAI raised $122 billion in March this year at a valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic’s valuation also surged from an initial $380 billion to $900 billion, driven by rapid growth of enterprise products such as Claude Cowork and Claude Code, combined with favorable reviews of the security performance of its latest model, “Mythos.” A survey by financial analytics startup Ramp of 50,000 paid AI model subscribers showed that 34.4% of customers used Anthropic and 32.3% used OpenAI, while Google and xAI accounted for just 4.48% and 1.93%, respectively.<\/p>\n

The two companies are also accelerating efforts to improve profitability ahead of initial public offerings (IPOs) planned for year-end. They are pushing through what amounts to a price normalization, raising token prices for new models by up to twice the previous level or restricting access to coding tools under flat-rate plans.<\/p>\n

The fact that major venture capital (VC) firms including Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Iconiq, and Insight Partners are pursuing a “dual-bet strategy” by investing in both companies simultaneously is also cited as a factor reinforcing the oligopoly structure.<\/p>\n

The Information said of the paid revenue analysis that “the results support investors’ argument that in the AI era, most software value comes from developers of advanced AI models,” adding that “even AI developers themselves are partially or almost entirely dependent on Anthropic and OpenAI models.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic logo. Reuters-YonhapOpenAI logo. Reuters-Yonhap Anthropic and OpenAI together account for nearly 90% of the paid artificial intelligence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[25844,8691,25846,25845,53,140,157,6020,7823,2899],"class_list":["post-42315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-xai","tag-ai-app-market","tag-ai-ipo","tag-ai-oligopoly","tag-ai-startup-revenue","tag-anthropic","tag-elon-musk","tag-openai","tag-sequoia-capital","tag-the-information","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}