OpenAI quarterly revenue crossed 10 billion dollars for the first time in the third quarter of 2026, the three months ending in September, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The reported milestone came with a sharp acceleration in growth, but it also highlighted OpenAI’s continuing operating losses and the widening gap between its revenue scale and its expense base.
OpenAI quarterly revenue: Growth accelerates sharply
The 10 billion dollar result represented an almost 50 percent jump from the 6.7 billion dollars of revenue recorded in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg. TechCrunch reported that this was a sizable increase in the pace of expansion, compared with roughly 18 percent growth between the first and second quarters. A year earlier, OpenAI brought in 3.9 billion dollars, so the latest figure showed that revenue had roughly tripled in twelve months.
OpenAI has also reached an annual revenue run rate of 50 billion dollars, Bloomberg reported. That measure provides a useful indication of the pace at which the company is scaling, although the comparison with Anthropic requires care. Anthropic counts sales made through its cloud partners, while OpenAI reports only its share of some partner sales.
The company has more than a billion weekly users, according to TechCrunch, but most are free users or subscribers to its cheapest plans. The scale of that audience helped establish OpenAI as a leading consumer AI brand, yet enterprise customers are now supplying a larger share of the revenue. OpenAI president Greg Brockman called the third-quarter performance an incredible revenue turning point and said the enterprise business doubled during the quarter and now accounts for the bulk of revenue. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar said the enterprise business doubled from the prior quarter while consumer sales rose 20 percent.
Enterprise sales drive the quarter
The Wall Street Journal and The Information reported that OpenAI grew revenue by about 50 percent quarter over quarter in the third quarter. Finance Yahoo said internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed revenue reached 10 billion dollars, up roughly 50 percent from the previous quarter.
OpenAI has made a series of commercial changes to compete more directly for enterprise business. The company cut prices on new models, put more resources into its coding tool Codex, hired Dali Rajic as its new head of sales and discontinued projects such as a video app. The Decoder reported that third-party data showed companies seeking cheaper alternatives to Claude, which boosted OpenAI’s API sales.
JPMorgan Chase was named by Brockman as a major customer. Finance Yahoo said demand for AI coding tools did much of the work as enterprise sales became OpenAI’s largest source of revenue, ahead of consumer subscriptions. That shift matters because enterprise AI is sold through procurement, security reviews and multi-year contracts, rather than one consumer subscription at a time. It can make revenue more predictable, while also placing OpenAI in direct competition with Anthropic for corporate budgets.
OpenAI’s broader consumer strategy still carries a cost. The Decoder said the company funds broad research into robotics and operates an expensive consumer business, while Anthropic focuses more heavily on enterprise customers and tools such as Claude Code and the Claude Cowork agent. OpenAI’s existing reach may provide a larger foundation, but the new revenue mix shows that converting that reach into higher-value business contracts is central to its next stage.
Losses remain substantial
Revenue growth did not translate into a smaller absolute operating loss. Adjusted operating loss rose to 10.9 billion dollars from 10.1 billion dollars in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg and internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as reported by Finance Yahoo. The latest loss was larger than the quarter’s entire revenue and 800 million dollars larger than the loss recorded three months earlier.
There was nevertheless an improvement in operating efficiency. Adjusted operating margin narrowed from negative 150 percent in the second quarter to negative 109 percent in the third quarter, Bloomberg reported. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI lost about 1.09 dollars at the operating level for every dollar of revenue it booked, against about 1.50 dollars one quarter earlier. Finance Yahoo said the improvement in margin was the strongest evidence in the documents that sales were scaling faster than costs, while also cautioning that total cash consumption increased.
Stock-based compensation climbed to 2.6 billion dollars and was not included in the adjusted operating loss, according to The Decoder. That exclusion means the adjusted figure does not capture the full economic cost presented by compensation in equity. It also helps explain why the comparison with Anthropic must be made carefully.
Anthropic remains the sharper benchmark
Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of 16.96 billion dollars, up 47 percent from the prior quarter, and an operating loss of 567 million dollars in a prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On those figures, OpenAI’s quarterly revenue was about 59 percent of Anthropic’s, while its operating loss was roughly 19 times larger, Finance Yahoo reported.
The comparison carries an important caveat. OpenAI’s figures are adjusted numbers from internal documents, while Anthropic’s come from a public regulatory filing. Finance Yahoo said the two sets of numbers are not yet measured on the same ruler. When OpenAI’s own prospectus becomes public, the adjusted figures will be replaced by audited ones, allowing a more direct comparison.
Anthropic and some of its backers plan to sell 825 million shares at 70 to 78 dollars each, which could raise as much as 64.4 billion dollars. The shares are expected to price on November 18 and begin trading the following day under the ticker ANT. Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate increased by 10 billion dollars within a month to 81 billion dollars as of the end of October, according to Bloomberg.
Public markets are the next test
OpenAI is targeting an IPO next year and is raising fresh capital at a 1.25 trillion dollar valuation, but it has so far raised less than half of the planned 30 billion dollars, The Decoder reported. The company filed confidentially for its own prospectus in June. Friar told employees in August that OpenAI will be a public company in 2027, according to CNBC’s account of the meeting.
That timetable places OpenAI directly behind Anthropic in the public markets. Anthropic’s first weeks as a public company will establish a benchmark for a frontier AI lab with 16.96 billion dollars in quarterly revenue and a 567 million dollar operating loss. OpenAI will bring a different profile, with 10 billion dollars in quarterly revenue and a much larger adjusted operating loss, to the same investor audience.
The immediate test is whether revenue can continue to grow faster than costs. A second quarter of margin improvement would strengthen the argument that OpenAI’s enterprise push is creating operating leverage. A reversal would suggest that the third quarter was driven mainly by a temporary lift from new models. For investors and corporate buyers, the central question is no longer whether OpenAI can reach scale, but whether its fast-growing enterprise revenue can narrow the distance between its reported profit and loss profile and Anthropic’s more efficient one. OpenAI quarterly revenue has now cleared 10 billion dollars in a quarter, but the loss line is what will decide how the market prices the company when its own prospectus finally replaces these adjusted figures with audited ones.