OpenAI is growing faster than even its own quarterly results would suggest, according to new remarks from its finance chief.
Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees this week that OpenAI's annualized revenue run-rate in July surpassed the company's revenue for the entire second quarter, CNBC reported. In other words, the pace at which money was coming in during a single month — projected across a year — outstripped what the business booked over three months in Q2.
The internal update, first surfaced by CNBC and echoed by multiple outlets, underscores how sharply demand for OpenAI's products has climbed. The company has previously disclosed that ChatGPT is nearing one billion weekly active users, and enterprise adoption of its API and agentic tools has continued to broaden.
The revenue milestone lands amid a pivotal stretch for OpenAI. The company is widely expected to pursue a public listing, making top-line momentum a closely watched metric for prospective investors. At the same time, OpenAI has dramatically expanded its spending commitments: recent reporting noted a compute budget raised toward roughly $750 billion, a bet that even Friar has privately flagged as a strain the company must prove it can fund.
Rival Anthropic has also been racing up the revenue charts — reporting annualized figures in the tens of billions — setting up a two-horse contest for the commercial frontier. For now, OpenAI's July numbers suggest its lead is widening rather than narrowing, even as capital costs balloon.
Read more on our ongoing AI business coverage.
