Madiha Yaqoob
Anthropic took in more revenue than OpenAI during the second quarter of 2026, the first time the maker of Claude has finished a quarter ahead of its larger rival. Anthropic reported roughly $11.6 billion for the three months to June against OpenAI’s $6.7 billion, according to reports from CNBC and The Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the companies’ results. Both firms remain private, the figures are preliminary, and neither has published an audited statement.
The figures, and how firm they are
OpenAI told investors revenue reached $6.7 billion in the quarter, up 18 percent from $5.7 billion in the first quarter, per the WSJ report. Its operating loss, including stock based compensation, widened to $12.3 billion from $9.3 billion over the same stretch. Losses grew faster than revenue, moving the company further from profitability rather than closer to it.
Anthropic’s climb is steeper. CNBC reported preliminary revenue above $11.5 billion for the quarter, up from $4.73 billion in the first quarter and $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier, a roughly fourteenfold increase year on year. Anthropic also reported positive adjusted operating income. The WSJ noted that the methodology behind that adjusted figure is unclear and that earlier investor communications excluded stock based compensation from some calculations, so the word “adjusted” is carrying real weight here.
Coding is where the gap opened
Both reports land on the same explanation. Anthropic’s Claude Code has gained ground with software developers, while growth in ChatGPT has slowed. Developer tools are a narrow slice of the overall AI user base but a disproportionately valuable one, because teams that adopt a coding assistant tend to run it all day and buy it per seat rather than dabbling on a free tier.
OpenAI’s position is close to the mirror image. Hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT without paying anything, and OpenAI carries the compute cost for all of them. Converting free users into paying ones has been the company’s central commercial problem for years, and these quarterly numbers do not suggest it has been solved.
Prices are already moving
OpenAI has cut prices on two recently released models, according to the WSJ, after some corporate customers grew more cautious about AI spending and shifted certain workloads to lower cost Chinese systems. That detail has more direct bearing on a working freelancer than the revenue table does.
Subscription pricing in this category has held remarkably steady since 2023, in large part because no vendor had a pressing reason to compete on it. Two suppliers of comparable size chasing the same business customers, with cheaper alternatives sitting underneath both of them, is the arrangement that historically pushes prices down or pushes more capability into the tiers people already pay for. For anyone billing in rupees or dirhams while paying for tools in dollars, that shift is worth watching over the next few quarters.
None of this justifies switching vendors on the strength of a single quarter. The useful takeaway is narrower: avoid building a workflow so tightly around one provider that moving later becomes expensive. If you are deciding what to standardise on, our rundown of AI tools that actually save freelancers time is a better starting point than a league table of quarterly revenue.
The question the numbers do not answer
OpenAI has signed enormous computing commitments on the expectation that it eventually generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year, which is why suppliers including Nvidia and Oracle carry exposure to whether that growth actually arrives. The WSJ also reported that OpenAI told investors growth accelerated during the third quarter following new model releases in July, so one quarter behind Anthropic may not establish a trend.
Anthropic has its own open item. A private company reporting an adjusted profit, with an IPO under discussion as soon as this autumn, has every incentive to present the most flattering version of its accounts. Whether the second quarter marked a turning point or a snapshot will be much clearer once either company has to file figures an auditor has signed.
Sources: CNBC, Anthropic revenue jumps to over $11.5 billion in Q2; Yahoo Finance summary of the WSJ report; Quartz.
