OpenAI posts $6.7B in Q2 revenue as its operating loss hits $12.3B

OpenAI booked $6.7 billion in revenue in the quarter ending in June, up 18% from $5.7 billion in the first quarter, according to a Wall Street Journal report covered by SiliconANGLE. But its operating loss widened to $12.3 billion, from $9.3 billion in the first quarter. The company is now losing money faster than it’s growing.

The timing hurt. Anthropic’s preliminary numbers, reported by CNBC from documents viewed by Bloomberg News, showed second quarter revenue above $11.5 billion. That’s up from $4.73 billion in the first quarter and $787 million a year earlier. Anthropic also posted its first operating profit, which SiliconANGLE put at $559 million, though CNBC called it positive adjusted operating income and noted the figures could still change.

Second quarter 2026	OpenAI	Anthropic
Q1 revenue	$5.7 billion	$4.73 billion
Q2 revenue	$6.7 billion	More than $11.5 billion (preliminary)
Q2 operating result	$12.3 billion loss	$559 million profit (reported)

Both companies are courting public investors, which raises the stakes on every quarter. Semafor reports Anthropic’s annualized revenue topped $65 billion, more than sevenfold higher than at the end of last year and more than 50% above OpenAI’s. CNBC reports Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao is already leading early IPO meetings, with a listing possible as soon as this fall.

OpenAI’s absolute numbers still dwarf most startups, but the trajectory is the worry. The company has raised around $180 billion, and its data center commitments assume revenue that eventually reaches hundreds of billions of dollars a year. SiliconANGLE notes its 18% sequential growth trailed CoreWeave, Micron and Palantir over the same period. OpenAI told investors that growth has accelerated since a new model generation shipped in July, though it didn’t offer numbers.

Neither company revealed how it calculated its operating results, and SiliconANGLE’s analyst source cautioned the numbers may not be entirely accurate. Even so, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research reads the gap as real, and traces it to Anthropic’s early bet on business customers.

Anthropic was chasing OpenAI to begin with, and it was way behind on the consumer side of the market, which is why it chose to focus on the enterprise instead. But that was a smart move because the enterprise is always the ultimate prize from both a spending and a stickiness perspective.

Holger Mueller, Constellation Research, via SiliconANGLE

The race isn’t over, though. Spend data from Ramp, which covers more than 70,000 US businesses, shows Anthropic overtook OpenAI among paying business customers in May, at 41% market share to 39%, TechCrunch reported. By July the gap had widened to nearly 44% against nearly 40%. Yet Ramp economist Ara Kharazian says OpenAI has grown faster so far in the third quarter.

Kharazian called GPT-5.6 Sol “increasingly the choice for developers” in a post on X. He said Fable 5 “disappointed both in adoption and real-world application” given its price and the data retention requirements regulators have imposed. Anthropic drew some outrage when it warned Fable users that it must retain their data for 30 days. OpenAI, for its part, has been previewing zero data retention processing.

Price pressure from below squeezes both labs. SiliconANGLE reports OpenAI cut prices on two of its newest models as corporate buyers grew cautious, and many organizations have shifted to cheaper open source systems, including Chinese ones. Together AI recently found GLM-5.3 ties Claude Fable 5 at a fifth of the price. “The US labs have cut the middle and are defending the top,” one expert told the Financial Times, via Semafor.

Inside OpenAI, the churn continues. Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser left after less than a year, following former COO Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo out the door. President Greg Brockman, one of three original co-founders still at the company, has taken a bigger role in product and business development. The next signal worth watching is whether OpenAI’s claimed post-July acceleration shows up in third quarter data, and in the IPO filings both companies are moving toward.