Man, something very strange is happening in the AI market and no one seems to be talking about the magnitude of it. Anthropic, which literally no one knew two years ago, just surpassed OpenAI in revenue. And it’s not even close — we’re talking about 30+ billion annualized versus 25 billion for OpenAI in April.

I’ll sketch out the scenario so you can understand the scale: in January 2025, Anthropic’s revenue was 1 billion. Nine months later? 30 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s revenue grew solidly but totally incomparable — from 13 to 25 billion in the same period. It’s like comparing normal growth to exponential explosion.

But here comes the plot twist nobody expected: the revenue structure of the two companies is completely different. OpenAI relies TOO MUCH on consumer users — 80% of the money comes from ChatGPT subscribers. It has 900 million active users, but do you know what the conversion rate is? Only 5%. The other 95% use it for free. It’s basically a fragile model.

Anthropic did the opposite. Focused on corporate clients from the start. 80% of revenue comes from companies and API calls. It already has over 1,000 clients paying over 1 million dollars per year. Eight of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies use Claude. That’s revenue that doesn’t come easily — signed contracts are hard to cancel.

Claude Code was the catalyst for all this. Launched in May 2025, in 9 months it was already generating 2.5 billion in annualized revenue. For context: Cursor took more than a year to reach 500 million. The difference is that Claude Code isn’t just a better tool — it’s a colleague that writes code for you. Anthropic’s engineering team now has 70-90% of the code generated by AI. It’s a real game-changer.

Now, why is OpenAI struggling? Besides the fragile consumer revenue structure, there are serious operational issues. It lost almost everyone important — Ilya Sutskever left, Mira Murati left, John Schulman went to Anthropic, Bob McGrew left. Of the original 11 co-founders, only Sam Altman and Wojciech Zaremba remained full-time until the end of 2025.

I’d be lying if I said Anthropic hadn’t done something different in people management. The seven founders are still there, no public exits in five years. And here’s something interesting: each of the founders owns almost the same percentage of shares — about 1.8% each. This eliminates the biggest source of tension in startups — nobody feels disadvantaged.

But there’s more. Dario Amodei spends 30-40% of his time ensuring the company culture stays consistent. He holds a company-wide meeting every two weeks where he presents a 3-4 page document on strategy, geopolitics, trends. They have an internal Slack channel system like Twitter where everyone — including Dario — shares ideas in real time. It’s like an open internal feed.

Compared to OpenAI, which during the 2023 board crisis had internal communication so fragmented that even the CTO didn’t know what was happening, the cultural difference is striking.

Now, I have to be honest: OpenAI isn’t dead. It has 900 million users, just raised 122 billion, ChatGPT is practically synonymous with AI in people’s minds. But it has structural problems that exploded in 2026. It’s forecasted to lose 140 billion this year. HSBC analysts believe profit won’t come before 2030. However, Anthropic expects positive cash flow in 2027.

The cost of training models is four times higher at OpenAI than at Anthropic through 2030. Let that sink in — FOUR TIMES. Part of it is aggressive infrastructure, part is probably efficiency.

There have also been embarrassing things. Sora, the video generator, cost 15 million a day to operate but only generated 2.1 million in revenue. They shut it down. Ads on ChatGPT were introduced in February — Sam Altman said in 2024 that ads made him “uncomfortably” — 15 months later, they did exactly that. With a 5% conversion rate, there was no option.

What’s more fascinating is that no one — like, 99% of analysts — would have bet that OpenAI would be overtaken in revenue by the end of 2023. The consensus shifted way too fast. That makes me wonder: is this new consensus right? OpenAI can still turn the game around if it manages to monetize consumers better. If it raises the conversion rate from 5% to 10%, the story changes.

But one thing is clear: in the first round of AI commercialization, Anthropic’s path was validated by the numbers. OpenAI’s path is being questioned. When Dario left in 2021 with six people, no one would have imagined that in five years they’d be leading in revenue. The most interesting part? The story isn’t over yet.