In an internal meeting with employees on Wednesday, finance chief Sarah Friar<\/a> and board chair Bret Taylor<\/a> touted OpenAI’s revenue growth and addressed competition with Anthropic<\/a>, CNBC has learned.\u00a0Friar said OpenAI’s annualized recurring revenue in July exceeded the entire second quarter. <\/p>\n “And Q2 was no slouch,” Friar said, according to a partial transcript of the meeting that was reviewed by CNBC. <\/p>\n Friar and Taylor said momentum was driven by the release of the company’s GPT-5.6 series<\/a> of models, its new enterprise agent called ChatGPT Work, and growing adoption of its AI coding tool, Codex.\u00a0<\/p>\n OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation<\/a> as it gears up for a potentially massive IPO. The company faces a constantly changing competitive landscape that includes Anthropic and Google<\/a> as well as a slew of so-called open-weight models out of China that can be accessed at much lower costs. Earlier this month, China’s Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3<\/a>, which claims it closes the gap with leading U.S. offerings and surpasses OpenAI and Anthropic’s most capable systems on some benchmarks.<\/p>\n OpenAI has been racing to bring in new users, particularly enterprises and developers, in order to generate the revenue needed to help support its infrastructure spending plans<\/a>, which are being funded by outside capital. \u00a0<\/p>\n In February, OpenAI told investors that it plans to target roughly $600 billion<\/a> in total compute spend by 2030. It’s currently in discussions with\u00a0Nvidia<\/a>\u00a0about a backstop of up to $250 billion that would help fund its plans to lease a massive new\u00a0AI data center in Ohio, as CNBC reported<\/a> earlier this week. <\/p>\n The staggering figures and the rapid rise of Anthropic, which surpassed OpenAI<\/a> by valuation earlier this year, have raised questions about the durability of OpenAI’s business. Anthropic said in May that its revenue run rate revenue topped $47 billion<\/a>, up from the roughly $10 billion that it generated for all of 2025, as its Claude Code tool has become a huge hit with developers.<\/p>\n The Information<\/a> reported in March that OpenAI had recently topped $25 billion in annualized revenue, citing a person with knowledge of the matter. <\/p>\n Taylor told employees on Wednesday that Anthropic had a strong start to the year, and he acknowledged that OpenAI had to play catch-up in the coding market. But he said he’s encouraged by Codex’s growth.<\/p>\n “You’re seeing people who went deep on Claude Code, ended up with a very high bill, and started looking for an alternative,” Taylor said at the meeting.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both OpenAI and Anthropic confidentially filed<\/a> for IPOs with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Neither company has disclosed additional details about when they plan to debut.\u00a0<\/p>\n WATCH:<\/strong> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles this week<\/a><\/p>\n
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