OpenAI CFO Says Q3 Revenue Rose Nearly 50% to $10 Billion, Still Below Anthropic's $17 Billion

Since Anthropic opened its IPO roadshow on Tuesday, Nov. 10, its biggest rival has put its own numbers in front of investors. OpenAI's third-quarter revenue reached $10 billion, up nearly 50% from the prior quarter, CFO Sarah Friar said in an interview Tuesday.

Friar put the annualized run rate at roughly $50 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported that Q2 growth was about 18%, which makes Q3 a sharp acceleration.

Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that the figure is nearly triple the same quarter a year earlier. The financial details were shared on an investor call Nov. 10. OpenAI declined to comment on that reporting.

Enterprise doubles

Friar said the driver was the enterprise business. "Our enterprise business doubled quarter over quarter," she said. Revenue is now split 50/50 between enterprise and consumer.

She named coding and cybersecurity products, plus virtual assistants like Dots, OpenAI's enterprise AI agent platform. The small- and medium-business offering grew more in Q3 than in the prior six quarters, she said.

The consumer side is still growing. Friar said sales rose 20% quarter over quarter, subscriptions topped 100 million, and weekly active users stand at 1.2 billion.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said annualized revenue grew 70% quarter over quarter in Q3, according to Crypto Briefing. That measure differs from the roughly 50% rise in actual quarterly revenue. The same report said the run rate is expected to pass $70 billion by year-end, and that the roughly $50 billion September figure reportedly fell short of what some investors had expected.

The Anthropic comparison

Anthropic reported Q3 revenue of about $17 billion, so it still leads OpenAI for the quarter. Its growth from Q2 slowed to around 47%, compared with more than 140% the quarter before, according to Bloomberg. Anthropic has no consumer business.

The two companies have historically calculated revenue differently, Bloomberg noted, so the totals are not a clean apples-to-apples comparison.

OpenAI's momentum comes after it slipped behind Anthropic by some measures this year. Bloomberg attributes the rebound to competitive new models, aggressive price cuts and a push into AI agents. Friar pointed to a different constraint. OpenAI was "really stuck" on its Microsoft Azure contract, she said, and Anthropic's success showed her the value of selling through multiple cloud providers.

"I think getting that unlocked, Anthropic showed me just the power of that model, and I think for us that can be a very big tailwind in 2027," Friar said.

Microsoft's slice

Microsoft said it generated $10 billion from commercial arrangements tied to OpenAI in its fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30. That is almost 11% of the company's $92.3 billion in quarterly revenue.

The matching $10 billion is not the same number as OpenAI's own revenue. Microsoft's figure comes from its own accounting of the partnership, not OpenAI's customer sales. It does show how much money moved through the relationship in the same window.

Profitability remains open

OpenAI has not disclosed an operating result for the quarter. Anthropic, by contrast, reported a $567 million operating loss for Q3, driven mainly by higher short-term computing costs, according to BigGo Finance. Whether OpenAI is profitable at its current scale remains unanswered.

Capital and timing

OpenAI is completing a funding round at a $1.25 trillion valuation, Bloomberg reported. An initial $11 billion piece has closed. The company has delayed any public listing until 2027.

Anthropic is targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation, Bloomberg reported. Its IPO could price Nov. 19 or Nov. 20.

How the public market weighs the two profiles is an open question. Anthropic offers larger, slower-growing revenue with no consumer exposure. OpenAI offers smaller, faster-growing revenue and a 100-million-subscriber consumer base, but no public listing until 2027. Anthropic's IPO, expected to price Nov. 19 or 20, will be the first market test.