OpenAI races Anthropic for enterprise revenue before fall IPOs
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- OpenAI is engaging consulting partners to help enterprises deploy and scale Codex, with partners receiving early access to AI tools, per CRO Denise Dresser, who told employees the market is "as competitive as I have ever seen it."
- Anthropic's Claude Code mass adoption tipped enterprise spending in its favor, with businesses now spending more with Anthropic than OpenAI, per Ramp data cited by Axios.
- OpenAI is touting a compute lead over Anthropic in a recent investor letter, and an OpenAI investor told Axios that greater compute capacity is the company's key advantage for fueling experimentation and model performance.
- Anthropic announced an expanded Amazon partnership to secure up to 5 gigawatts of additional compute, even as CEO Dario Amodei has cautioned that aggressively scaling compute is risky given its high costs and uncertain demand.
- David Sacks, the White House tech adviser, warned on the "All-In" podcast that if OpenAI doesn't catch up on revenue, Anthropic could take a lead over the next one to two years that could be "insurmountable."
- Both labs are racing toward IPOs that could come as soon as this fall, with secondary-market investor demand running stronger for Anthropic than OpenAI, per WSJ and Bloomberg reports.
Why it matters: The two labs are making opposite bets ahead of the biggest AI IPOs in history: OpenAI is spending to grow users while defending a compute lead, and Anthropic is spending to protect margins while riding enterprise demand. If Anthropic's lead compounds, OpenAI may enter public markets explaining a revenue gap rather than riding momentum — secondary markets already price Anthropic more hotly than OpenAI.
