OpenAI's second-quarter sales grew 18% quarter over quarter to $6.7 billion, but its losses widened from $9.3 billion to $12.3 billion — a sobering picture of the cost of staying at the frontier of artificial intelligence, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing sources familiar with the figures.
The numbers land at an uncomfortable moment for the ChatGPT maker. For years, OpenAI set the pace of the AI industry, with every revenue milestone treated as evidence of unstoppable momentum. The Journal's report shows a company still growing — but growing more slowly than the rival now widely seen as its closest challenger. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
Anthropic Doubles Down
The same report paints a strikingly different picture at Anthropic. According to the Journal's sources, the Claude maker's second-quarter sales more than doubled to $11.6 billion, and the company recorded a small operating profit — the first time a frontier AI lab has turned a quarterly operating profit, as Forbes framed it in a piece titled "Anthropic Posts First Profitable Quarter In Frontier AI."
The quarter-over-quarter contrast is stark. Anthropic's sales in the second quarter more than quadrupled year over year, according to summaries of the Journal's reporting carried by financial outlets including Moomoo. International Business Times put it bluntly: "Anthropic Revenue Explodes Past $11.5 Billion. Its Blockbuster IPO Is Now Coming Into Focus."
On an annualized basis, Yahoo Finance noted that Anthropic's revenue run rate — which reached $65 billion at the end of July, as CNBC and Bloomberg previously reported — has now surpassed OpenAI's roughly $40 billion annualized pace.
Why the Gap Is Widening
Neither company publishes audited financials, so the figures rest on sourcing by major financial newsrooms. But the directional story they tell is consistent with everything visible from the outside: Anthropic's Claude models have become the default choice for a large share of enterprise developers, particularly in coding, and API demand has compounded quarter after quarter.
The Journal's own framing was blunt: OpenAI's second-quarter sales show "tepid growth compared with Anthropic." It is a sentence that would have seemed implausible eighteen months ago, when OpenAI's revenue curve was the envy of the software industry and rivals were measured by how far behind it they lagged.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is spending heavily on compute and has deliberately slowed the pace of its frontier training runs. Chief Executive Sam Altman said this week that the decision to pace the company's AI development was driven by research observations showing "various degrees of misalignment" in frontier-scale models, according to Time — a safety-first posture that trades near-term model releases for caution. The company also paused reinforcement learning training for two weeks and overhauled its safety practices after determining that an upcoming system may have met a critical cyber capability threshold, Axios reported this week.
The spending side of the ledger matters as much as the revenue side. OpenAI's widened $12.3 billion quarterly loss reflects the enormous cost of training, inference infrastructure and the compute guarantees it has signed with partners including Nvidia. Whether that burn converts into durable revenue growth is now the central question for its bankers ahead of a widely expected public listing.
Two Mega-IPOs on the Calendar
Both companies are racing toward public markets. Anthropic confidentially filed IPO paperwork and has seen its valuation discussed at levels approaching $965 billion, with quarterly profit projections exceeding $1 billion, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in August. France's Le Monde reported in June that OpenAI had filed its own draft IPO plans just one week after Anthropic — setting up what could be the two largest technology listings in history, arriving within weeks of each other.
The rivalry is already reshaping the earnings of the tech giants that back them. When Microsoft reported its most recent quarterly results in late July, it logged $3.2 billion from its investment in Anthropic, even as its long OpenAI partnership delivered what TechCrunch called "a mixed bag" for the software giant's numbers.
What It Means for the AI Trade
For investors, the Journal's figures crystallize a narrative that has been building all year: the AI boom is no longer a single-horse race. Anthropic's combination of faster growth, an operating profit and a rocket-ship run rate gives public-market investors a second — and arguably now leading — benchmark for what a frontier AI business looks like.
For OpenAI, the report is a reminder that momentum in AI can shift in quarters, not decades. The company still commands the largest consumer AI franchise in the world in ChatGPT, deep distribution partnerships, and one of the strongest research teams ever assembled. But with losses widening and its closest rival now out-earning it in quarterly sales, the pressure is on to show that the most valuable private company in AI can turn scale into profitability before its own ticker hits the market.
As both firms approach their public debuts, every quarterly leak will be scrutinized like an earnings report — and on this one, the scoreboard favors Anthropic.
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